No it’s not. It’s far worse. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be laughable. As well as a cover-up there’s also a matter of pride here; ie, that western technology is far superior to the old Soviet technology. At Chernobyl there was somewhere between 80 to 100 tons of nuclear fuel, and a single reactor blew-up. At Fukushima there’s more than 2000 tons of nuclear fuel and three reactors in meltdown, plus cooling pools that are overheating (the No.4 reactor cooling pool fire has been the worst/most dangerous incident so far). After more than a month it seems certain that criticality is still taking place at Fukushima, and a commercial company (TEPCO) is pouring water over the problem, water that becomes highly radioactive and has to go somewhere.
Back in 1986, it took two or three days for the Soviet authorities (and principally Mikhail Gorbachev) to fully understand what was happening at Chernobyl. Once they realised the enormity of the situation they chucked the entire resources of the nation at the problem. More than 600,000 people were brought in (most of them from the military) to deal with the crisis. These people were known as the ‘Liquidators’ (many of them died from radiation sickness). The Soviets realised from the outset that the only solution was to emtomb the stricken reactor. They did this by dropping thousands of tons of lead, sand and boron from helicopters. 62 of the pilots later died from radiation sickness (these pilots are not included in the official casualty figures for Chernobyl).
Compare this with what’s been going on in Fukushima for the last month. Granted, Japan has just suffered one of the worst natural disasters in history. Thing is, if they don’t start to get their act together with regard to Fukushima they’ll be facing an even greater man made disaster, and so will the rest of the world.
Here’s Dr. Michio Kaku, a well-known professor of theoretical physics, talking about it on the Democracy Now channel…