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Mod pls delete bottom post and feel free to edit forthcoming long post. Dont know how to link to a personal email.

ACT NOW: KEEP THE PRESSURE ON TO HELP THE CHILDREN OF FUKUSHIMA


August 16, 2011

Dear Friends,

Things just aren't getting better in Japan. While radiation releases from Fukushima Daiichi are much lower than they were, they continue nonetheless, and they will continue for months to come.

Perhaps more importantly, the Japanese government's decision to cover-up the severity and consequences of the initial meltdowns at Fukushima needlessly imperiled hundreds of thousands of its own citizens--and continues to so today.

If you haven't read it yet, last week the New York Times published a compelling and chilling account of the government's deliberate failure in March to warn and evacuate its citizens despite the evidence of ongoing large radiation releases.

To make matters worse, instead of acting to counter the effects of its negligence and relocate people living on contaminated lands, Japan chose to increase allowable radiation exposure levels twenty times--even for its children.

NIRS is proud that the radiation monitors we sent to Japan were used to uncover the growing scandal of radioactive contamination of schools in Japan. Your support for NIRS enabled us to do that.

But now we need to support Japan in other ways--and that means increasing the pressure on the Japanese government to relocate people living in harm's way.

You may have signed petitions to Japan before--but we all need to support our colleagues in Japan and do so again. Please sign your name here to this petition written by our friends at Green Action Japan.

The tragedy of children living and going to school in contaminated areas is heartwrenching. Check this short news video broadcast on Australian TV this week.

And watch another short video of Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action Japan explaining the situation in the Fukushima region to the crowd at the August 7 MUSE concert.

Then make sure you sign the petition and share it with your friends and colleagues.

Two more bits of news: The Reclaim Power Southeast action camp, co-sponsored by NIRS, is this weekend (August 18-22) near Asheville, North Carolina. You can find more information and register here.

And NIRS is pleased and proud to introduce to you our newest staff member, Dominique French, who started work here this week. She is a graduate of the University of South Florida, has a law degree from the University of South Florida, a degree in environmental law from George Washington University and a passion for our work. She'll be working with many, many of you in the coming weeks and months; and will begin by leading NIRS' upcoming campaign on emergency evacuation issues. Her e-mail is dominiquef@nirs.org.

Again, let's make sure the Japanese government knows the entire world is watching. Please sign the petition to protect the children of Fukushima.

Together we can--and will--do great things,


Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
nirsnet@nirs.org
www.nirs.org

Your contributions make our work possible: helping pay for radiation monitors for Japan, hiring new staff, preventing new reactor construction; seeking shutdown of dangerous existing reactors; building a nuclear-free carbon-free energy future. We can't do this work without your support. Please make a tax-deductible contribution here, or after you've signed the petition.

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@Elaine MsMilkytheclown just posted an update with an NHK report citing again 1 billion becquerels per hour www.youtube.com . Although perhaps that's the older report, but I think maybe not, and her updates are usually always that, new content. If so, we're getting schizophrenic information, it's stopped emitting and it's emitting about 1 billion becquerels per hour at the same time, wow that!!

And that NHK report says Tepco plans steep cuts in emissions by January 2012, and we're told by multiple major-media sources that instead they not only cut emissions months ahead of schedule, they shut them down cold, that is cold apart form 1 billion becquerels per hour.

@Edano, I know they did on July 20th, but not sure if MsMilkytheclown update is not a new reiteration of that. And at the least, if Tepco promised lower emissions by Jan 2012, it's unbelievable for media sources to report suddenly it's zero w/o any explanation how the Fukushima disaster was suddenly unexpectedly resolved.

You'd think major media would have journalists who track cases as least half as close as we do. But that's not always the case.

"Major media" are struggling for survival, and their reporting staffs are nothing like what most people imagine. Expect nothing from them, and you won't be disappointed.

Here the origin of the zero-emissions claim on the PBS NewsHour www.youtube.com the Mayor of Minamisoma City, Katsunobu Sakurai. PBS just leaves his false claim hanging, never correcting it. But that's what good journalism would do, either not run false statements or correct them.

One one reason the emissions level is important is found in a comment to a video by one of the most prolific Japanese citizen Geiger counters on youtube, firstsuccess , and he says rad measurements are getting worse in Fukushima City : www.youtube.com and he's been testing since spring.