(NaturalNews) At the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, radiation isn’t the only thing leaking out. Each week, it seems there’s another small leak of the truth that has been deliberately hidden from the public. Yesterday, TEPCO finally admitted it has been downplaying the ongoing radiation release levels by a factor of almost twenty.
But the real story here is exactly how TEPCO arrived at the deceptively small numbers it has been reporting since the 2011 accident. It turns out (see below) that TEPCO has been deliberately using radiation detectors that “max out” at relatively low levels (i.e. they don’t go higher than 100 mSv). When those detectors are pegged at their max readings, instead of switching to a more capable instrument with a larger detection range, they simply report the maximum detection limit of the smaller detector as the “real” exposure number.
Huh? Yeah. Seriously.
Here’s how we discovered this:
Radiation leak 18 times higher than previously disclosed
According to a TEPCO press release covered in Bloomberg Japan, “TEPCO announced high-dose radiation of hourly 1800 mSv from the tank periphery has been observed.”
This is highly radioactive water leaking from the now-famous “storage tanks” that were never designed to be long-term storage tanks in the first place. Previously, TEPCO told the public these tanks were only leaking 100 mSv per hour, downplaying the actual radiation leak level by almost 95%.
That same story goes on to say:
Ito Tetsuo Professor of Kinki University (radiation biology) said, regarding the level of hourly 1800 mSv, “There is only a thing called death if you stay exposed to this for four hours. One hundred percent of persons will die within 30 days.”
The BBC is also covering this story, just in case you want to see this in English. On the BBC’s page, it says:
Radiation levels around Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.
It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.
The new reading will have direct implications for radiation doses received by workers who spent several days trying to stop the leak last week, the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.
And that’s the understatement of the year. “Direct implications” means the clean-up workers are already dead.
Why the increase from 100 mSv to 1800 mSv? They finally started using a different radiation detector
So how, exactly, did TEPCO get readings of just 100 mSv per hour until recently when they discovered readings of 1800 mSv per hour?
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