Lessons Learned Fukushima USA

Into Eternity

How NOT to Learn the Lessons From Fukushima.
As a San Clemente City Manager or Council Member:

1) Exclude the public from voicing their serious safety concerns about SONWGS despite the fact that it was the public that demanded this meeting in the first place.

2) Discourage informed two-sided discussion at all cost.

3) Establish early on that the priority of the pubic meeting is the duration of the meeting and that exposing the gaping holes in our public safety is secondary.

4) Talk down to the public with the authority vesting in you by the very public that is now asking for your help.

5) Assume that the public, fearing for their safety, are alarmist, and that the experts have all the answers.

6) Repeat the exact mistakes made by public officials in Japan and align yourself with the interests of nuclear industry to the detriment of the public safety that you are mandated to protect.

7) Tell the PUBLIC that allowing them to voice their safety concerns at a PUBLIC meeting, that the PUBLIC has requested for 2 years, is not only impossible due to the City Council’s PUBLIC meeting protocols but also because it would simply take too much time.

Lessons Learned From Fukushima by the NRC and Power Plant Owners:

1) Suppress the HORRIFIC facts and do it with a sense of unassailable authority. It calms the pubic really well.

2) Offer the public TECHNICAL answers to MORAL questions regarding the immense public safety risks of nuclear power.  It confuses the public really well.

3) Lie to the public and if they don’t buy it, lie again and again until it becomes your truth.  It feels really good.

4) When you don’t have the answers to the public's serious safety questions, pretend that you do by baffling the pubic with your technical B.S.  It will make you feel really powerful.

5) Tell the public, when your nuclear reactor cores are in full meltdown, that “We have the situation under control”  Misinformation is your best friend.

6) As catastrophic levels of radioactive fallout peg the dial on your radiation detectors, simply shift the decimal point over several spaces on the detectors and again reassure the pubic that you "have everything under control."  This lesson worked really well inJapan to calm the public and prevent panic.

7) Intimidate the hell out of your employees so that they fear telling the truth about safety issue found at the plant.  It helps set up the pre-conditions for #8 below.

8) Frame all discussion about nuclear plant safety in such a way that all public meetings have a Hollywood style "happy ending".  America loves good fiction with a happy ending.

9) Focus on minutiae like “We practiced how to turn the valves properly” and downplay the REAL ISSUES like, “There is nothing we can do to protect you and your family if this thing blows and you will need to figure out how to protect yourselves from the onslaught of deadly radiation.”  It reinforces #1 above really well.

10) Don’t tell the public that a single nuclear accident doesn’t stop killing for hundreds of generations, or that a single fuel flea smaller than the size of the period at the end of this sentence is a death sentence to you or your children if you accidentally inhale it.  Opps, does this apply to everyone?

11) And definitely do not tell the U.S. public that they have been swimming in, and inhaling, Fukushima fuel fleas since April 2011.  That would be contradictory to item #1 above and does not lead to the happy ending in #8 above.


Into Eternity

Torgen Johnson
www.sanonofre.com