A Thai with American citizenship arrested for lèse majesté and denied bail
Prachatai: May 27, 2011
http://www.prachatai3.info/english/node/2551
Joe Gordon, 54, has been arrested by the Department of Special Investigation in Nakhon Ratchasima for lèse majesté and computer crimes. The DSI alleges that he owns a blog which offers a link to download The King Never Smiles.
Over 20 DSI officials arrested him at his house in Nakhon Ratchasima on 24 May at about 10 am, seized his desktop computer and mobile phone, and took him to DSI headquarters in Bangkok for interrogation.
He has been charged by the DSI with lèse majesté, inciting unrest and disobedience of the law in public, and disseminating computer data which threatens national security.
On 26 May, the DSI brought Gordon, his Thai name withheld at his request, to the Criminal Court to ask for him to be remanded.
The DSI considers that this is an important case, as it believes that he is ‘Nai Sin Sae Jew (นายสิน แซ่จิ้ว)’, the owner of a blog, which was created in the USA in 2007 and has a link to download the banned book The King Never Smiles.
Gordon denied all charges and contacted the US Embassy.
His friends brought a land title deed worth over 1.7 million baht to place as a bail guarantee, but, in response to objections from the DSI, the court denied bail, citing that this was a serious case concerning national security, and that the accused might tamper with evidence.
He was then sent to Bangkok Remand Prison.
According to Gordon, he lived in Colorado, USA, for over 30 years, and has acquired American citizenship. He returned to Thailand over a year ago to receive medical treatment for high blood pressure and gout.
He said that he had never thought of returning to Thailand, but due to his illness and the death of his wife who had died from cancer, he decided to come back to receive treatment in his hometown.
During his stay in Nakhon Ratchasima, he taught English to children. He said that the authorities had sent a young man to study with him as a spy. They, however, never discussed politics, he said.
An official from the US Embassy has visited him at the prison, and told him that the embassy will try to help him as much as possible.
Source:
Thailand charges US citizen with insulting royals
Agence France-Presse: May 27, 2011
A US citizen has been charged in Thailand with insulting the monarchy after he posted material deemed offensive on his blog and put a link to a banned book, authorities said Friday.
Thai-born Lerpong Wichaikhammat, 54, was arrested on Tuesday in Nakhon Ratchasima province in northeast Thailand and is currently being held at Bangkok Remand Prison.
“He translated articles which are deemed insulting to the monarchy and posted them on his blog. Also he provided a link to a book” perceived as critical of the royal family, said police Lieutenant Colonel Kovit Tardmee.
“He left Thailand when he was 35 and returned for medical treatment in November 2009. He is scheduled to go back to the US this December.”
The US embassy said it was providing consular assistance to the man.
“We can confirm that he is an American citizen,” a spokesman told AFP.
An official at Thailand’s Criminal Court said Lerpong had been denied bail during a hearing on Thursday.
“He was charged with lese majeste, subversion and uploading or linking to false information under the Computer Crime Act,” she said.
The monarchy is an extremely sensitive subject in politically divided Thailand, which is preparing for an election on July 3, and rights groups have expressed fears over use of lese majeste to suppress freedom of expression.
Controversy over the law was stoked earlier this month when prominent Thai historian Somsak Jeamteerasakul, who has tested taboos with calls for reform of the monarchy, was charged with lese majeste.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 83, the world’s longest-reigning monarch and revered as a demi-god by many Thais, has been in hospital since September 2009.
“Thai” lese majeste and “foreign” lese majeste?
Political Prisoners in Thailand: June 1, 2011
http://thaipoliticalprisoners.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/thai-lese-majeste-and-foreign-lese-majeste/
The Bangkok Post confuses PPT in its reporting of the latest lese majeste machinations of Thailand’s political police at the Department of Special Investigation (DSI). Apologies for missing this report a couple of days ago.
The DSI is to charge Joe Gordon with lese majeste as Lerpong Wichaikhammat and as “a Thai citizen, even though he also holds US citizenship…”.
We are confused because lese majeste has long been used against foreigners, so we are puzzled as to what distinction is being made. Perhaps it is the logic of teh Thai-Cambodian border?
The DSI say he can be charged as a Thai “because he still holds Thai nationality.” They add that he “applied for a new ID card in 2009. He opened a language school and had a trading business in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Wang Nam Khiew district.” In addition, he is said to be “receiving a 500 baht monthly subsistence allowance from the War Veterans Organisation…”.
Perhaps the DSI is trying to warn off the US embassy?
The “evidence” that the DSI says it has “included an IP address and communication equipment which showed he operated the website Nor Por Chor USA from his house in Nakhon Ratchasima. Thai alphabet characters Nor Por Chor were the widely used initials for the Thai name of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).” The DSI alleges that Joe “posted articles containing lese majeste content on the website using the name of Sin sae Jiew…”.
PPT has “evidence” in inverted commas because it is highly likely that none of this evidence will ever be available anywhere or made public. In lese majeste cases, allegations effectively remain secret “evidence.” Rarely is the evidence subject to scrutiny and challenge.
The DSI claims that it “had spent more than two years investigating … [Joe's] activities, not just a few days, before his arrest.”
Can anyone believe anything the DSI says? In recent history it loses evidence, manipulates reports, changes its stories, loses suspects and regularly makes wild allegations.
Can internet be free again?
Bangkok Post: March 8, 2010
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/225380/can-internet-be-free-again
With an election campaign unofficially under way, the government should urgently review and loosen its harsh censorship of the internet. The massive, expensive programme has made Thailand one of the world’s most censored nations. This policy should be examined and vastly reduced in scope, or better still, binned entirely. The vast, constantly growing list of tens of thousands of banned websites needs review by an informed and independent group. Censorship has gone out of hand without oversight and accountability, and needs to be changed.
Start with the uncomfortable number: 65,000. That is how many websites had been blocked or shut down by the authorities as of last year. The public is not allowed to know the actual number, and it is debatable whether anyone really knows how much of the internet is officially interdicted and banned to Thais. The number of 65,000 was given rather triumphantly by the spokesman for the Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation. He bragged that the CRES was issuing orders to the Information and Communications Technology Ministry to block websites and web pages at an average of 500 per day, and he let slip the 65,000 number.
The CRES (also openly) admitted that it blocked websites for no other reason than that they were apparently run by one of the many factions of the political opposition, the red shirts. This was legal under the martial law-like rule of the CRES. It is illegal under the constitution, where opposing the government is a virtue, not a sin.
During its existence, the CRES always refused to provide any information on individual websites blocked by Thai authorities. Because the CRES is gone, the government should begin a public review of banned websites, with an eye to opening as many as possible to internet access once again.
Many agencies are involved in censoring the internet. All have highly questionable authority under a constitution where the government is charged with protecting freedom of information, not stifling it. As far back as the Thaksin governments, the chief internet censor has been the minister of information and communications technology.
It has become a joke that the ICT Ministry stands for “Internet Censorship of Thailand Ministry”. Web censorship has become a routine. But it starts with a huge staff, working in the most opaque manner, which surfs the web looking for sites to censor. Lists are drawn up, handed to a judge who orders the sites closed or, if they are hosted in another country, blocked.
At no step in internet censorship is there oversight, accountability or responsibility. Former ICT minister Ranongruk Suwunchwee once described the process as a routine one, in which she never became involved. Both she and the current minister, Juti Krairiksh, have publicly promised to vet the ‘Net for illegal references or libel concerning the high institution.
Beyond that, no one ever has managed to breach the veil of secrecy of who selects sites to censor, or what are the criteria for censorship. For certain, no one has been able to appeal a decision to close or block an internet site.
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is clearly on the verge of dissolving the Lower House for a national election. Voters need a full range of information sources, including internet sites of all political opinion.
The prime minister can do everyone a favour by ending the current secret censorship and opening a system of open review and legal appeal.
Interview with Thai student behind hit Censorsh*t video
Jon Russell: April 13, 2011
http://asiancorrespondent.com/52276/interview-with-the-thai-student-behind-hit-censorsht-video/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chskA9BB9zA
With more than 110,000 views since being uploaded 2 April, YouTube video Censorsh*t – an innovative play on Thailand’s censorship policy – has been a popular talking point on social networks and the web across Thailand.
The video is inspired by Thai strict TV censorship regulations, familiar to many that reside or know Thailand well, but I was struck with just how the video could relate to web censorship, and the fact that the state retains ultimate control over what netizens in Thailand can read or see alone, with FACT Thai reporting that “425,296 web pages were blocked in Thailand to December 22″ – a shocking statistic indeed.
Below is my brief Q&A with the video’s producer, ‘Madastro’ ,a young, Thai student for whom the video was a mid-term project.
1. Can you explain a little about who you are and what you do?
I study in a Multimedia Design program and I’m interested in 2D animation industry, but making short film is also enjoyable to me.
2. I understand that the video is a project you are working on at university – where did you find the inspiration to make such a creative video?
Actually I have an idea to make a satirical joke about censorship for many years, but the ‘snap’ came when I went on a ‘Channel 3′ tour with my faculty.
As they took us to the censoring room, I heard a person in the ‘censoring labour’ say “I have no idea why they order me to censor this stuff”, then I suddenly changed the topic of my project to this.
The real ‘inspiration’ was mostly from the Channel 9′s brainless censorship, not those typical cigarette pixelations, but they pixelate everything that we couldn’t bear to imagine. From the delicious meal that has some alcohol as an ingredient to the scientific model (example from a Pantip.com user) and many more. This is unnecessary and brainless to me, it ruins the whole ‘Modern Nine’ channel, and this should be stopped.
3. Are you surprised how popular the video has become, with more than 100,000 viewings as of yesterday?
I firstly thought that “this vid is going to be popular, somehow”, but I didn’t expect to see 100k views in one week! But the problem that comes with it was some misunderstanding and most of them just did not read the description I wrote (because I was not clever enough to explain the whole idea in the vid) as they viewed the vid as the embedded clip. So I’m not quite satisfied with the ‘result’ .
4. How important an issue is internet censorship in Thailand to you?
In this vid, I was focusing more on the television censorship. To be honest, I don’t have enough information to judge the whole thing about Thailand’s internet censorship, maybe it just didn’t bother me much because I normally just don’t surf porn (laugh) and the other risky sites. Not that I don’t have any concern about it, but just not knowing enough.
5. Finally, what are your plans for the future when you graduate university?
Conquer the world!
Lol just kidding.
I’ll be joining the media industry, and, if fortunately, I might be able to make some change from the inside.
P.s. Actually, I am just a normal student who likes to create some entertaining stuff, nothing special. Thanks again for your concern. 
Thanks to Madastro for responding so quickly and candidly, good luck for the future and helping change the culture of censorship from the inside.
As it stands, your video has helped raise awareness of censorship and its frankly absurd usage within television – though they may censorship smoking and other actions, Thai authorities are inconsistent enough to allow programs not suitable for kids to run during the day/evening on some channels.
While comparisons draw with internet and print media restrictions are equally as valid, ultimately censorship is censorship, and the video clearly demonstrates how absurd the idea of someone controlling the information that those in Thailand see and hear is.
More details on Madastro can be found at the his exteen webpage or on Twitter: @mad_madmad
Expat Shield: Free UK VPN
19-06-11
Ramakanth
Techno360: November 11, 2010
http://www.techno360.in/expat-shield-free-uk-vpn/
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[CJ Hinke of FACT comments: A doctor friend of mine graffitied a British Columbia highway in 1984 with a simple slogan to combat the greed of clearcut loggers: CONSUMERISM CONSUMES US ALL! The message is even more clear today than decades ago.
We are no more fulfilled by our shiny gadgets, no more content with ourselves. Contentment is the opposite of suffering—dukkha. Every single one of us is capable and competent to live a simple life and benefit others. Be mindful. Think about every single thing you buy and all you throw away. (There is no away.)
The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence—anicca—is often the only thing that keeps us selfless—anatta! So just let it go and do your best, it’s all illusion anyway!]
Unlearning Consumerism: Liberating the Greedy Mind
Stephanie Kaza
Green Path Overlook: 2002
http://www.amalthys.com/greenpath/012unlearningconsumerism.html
Fall arrives with the first yellow leaves, and the students return to campus. The young ones are eager for new experience and new learning. As a professor I have mixed feelings about their return. Their fresh brave energy is inspiring and brings my own calling into focus. But internally I struggle with what I must teach them. Courses in environmental studies reveal a disturbing aspect of human nature – the relentless consumption of resources. Landscapes ravaged by greed are not a pretty sight. Biological and political demands for more land, more water and more energy have changed the face of the Earth. Confronting this suffering leads inevitably to complex questions. Though I have worked with these issues across many years and from many angles, I still carry a big weight in my heart. Each semester I join the students in confronting my own complicity in perpetuating this abuse.
How can we understand this greed? Buddhist psychology explains greed in terms of attraction and aversion. In the Buddhist view, all emotions are a manifestation of three basic tendencies — wanting more of something (greed), wanting less of something (hate), and wanting something that doesn’t exist (delusion). The first set of emotions can be understood as the biological drive to go toward what is useful or pleasurable, the second as the desire to back away from what is harmful or distasteful, and the third as being confused by what is illusory. Together they are known as the Three Poisons, the source of all human suffering. The Buddhist path of liberation focuses on the study of and release from desire, emphasizing the cultivation of equanimity instead. Greed is not seen so much as a sin but rather as a driving force affecting all beings. Sometimes it is useful, as when animals gather food stores for the winter; sometimes it is harmful, as when resources are exhausted under pressure. Greed cannot be eliminated; it is part of the very process of life that sustains us… and undermines us.
Human greed has clearly taken its toll on the natural world: soil erosion, water depletion, habitat destruction and species decimation are common on every continent. Most wars and colonial occupations are likewise based in greed. Our material lives reflect the cumulative impact. Americans consume their average body weight every day in materials extracted and processed from farms, mines, rangelands and forests. America’s households contain and consume more stuff than all other households throughout history put together. Almost all of our household products have drawn on labor or natural resources from the global reaches of the world.
How are these systems-level impacts reflected in our modem sense of self-identity? In today’s consumer society, the self seems to be defined as “I am what I have,” or to paraphrase Descartes, “I shop, therefore I am.” Self-involvement is reinforced by ads that play on people’s needs for security and acceptance. By setting up idealized stereotypes, advertisements foster greed and a sense of dissatisfaction and inadequacy. Self-identity can merge with specific products, generating addictions to brand names and even to shopping itself. Ecopsychologists Kanner and Gomes believe that “shopaholism” is a widespread, chronic problem in which people shop to escape suffering much the same way people use drugs and alcohol. Consumerism rests on the assumption that human desires are infinitely expandable; if there are endless ways to be dissatisfied, there are endless market niches for new products to meet those desires. Marketers very skillfully exploit what is fundamental to human nature – desire. As consumerism spreads alarmingly across the globe, religions are asking, “What can we offer as an antidote to this madness?”
The Buddha saw that dealing with desire is a fundamental human challenge. In his teaching of the Four Noble Truths he lays out a specific methodology for dealing with this all-pervasive suffering. The teaching is phrased in terms of a medical diagnosis: suffering is the disease, craving is the cause of the disease, there is a cure for the disease, and that cure is the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. How can we apply this diagnosis to consumerism?
Let us begin with the cause of the disease: dissatisfaction or clinging, craving, desire, attachment. Taking many forms, it is the ceaseless striving for some new state or feeling, or for satisfaction and permanence. Because of the ever-changing nature of reality, this striving is always frustrated. Craving also includes aversion, the thirst for non-existence. In this type of suffering, one craves relief or escape from what is unpleasant or undesirable. The first of the Three Poisons, seeking pleasure (or greed), is the cornerstone of marketing psychology. Advertisements urge consumers to increase their greed in as many arenas as possible. Consider, for example, fast food “super-sizes,” bargain basement sales, the barrage of ads on the Internet. Aversion/hatred, or the desire to get rid of, is equally central to marketing strategy. Pest control products get rid of hated insects, deodorants get rid of hated body odors, laundry soaps get rid of unwanted stains. Consumers readily believe they will be happy if they can just get rid of the things they don’t want. Delusion or ignorance is perpetuated by marketers to keep people confused about what they need. All three poisons drive the consumer to endless suffering, all to the profitable benefit of those who take advantage of this human tendency.
The way out of the suffering of consumerism lies in cutting through to root causes. This is the Third Noble Truth – that liberation from ceaseless suffering is possible. For the oppressed and deluded consumer, this is the most critical truth. It is the shining jewel in what Buddhism offers as a cure for the disease of consumerism: one has choice in the matter. One can choose to remain sick with the disease, or one can choose liberation and healing. Ethical choices in consumption are those that bring personal and environmental healing. Unethical choices are those that perpetuate personal and environmentally destructive activities. The Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path, the practice of making conscious choices in various arenas of action, offering the seeker liberation from the suffering of consumerism.
The liberation goal in this context might be defined as santutthi, or contentment. This involves freedom from desire and attachment – the opposite of dukkha, or suffering. One is content with what one has and is. Thai scholar Pibob Udomittipong describes how deeply this concept challenges modern consumerism. Soon after the first Thai National Economic Development Plan was drafted in the 1960s, the government banned Buddhist monks from teaching about contentment. The official governing body of the monks, the Sangha Authority, sanctioned this decree, apparently accepting the reasoning that santutthi was a barrier to the ideals of economic growth. The late Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, a very revered and socially engaged Thai teacher, argued against the ban, pointing out that contentment leads to the development of wisdom and is therefore essential for real human progress.
Consumerism is centered on the deliberate cultivation of desire. The traditional teaching of the twelve limbs of codependent origination offers a useful tool both for analysis of and insight into consumerism. This cycle is often used to describe the process of reincarnation; it applies as well to individual moments of grasping. Liberation can be found at every link in the chain.
The twelve limbs follow each other in order: ignorance, karmic formations, consciousness, name and form, six sense fields, contact, feelings, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, death, ignorance and so on. The pull of each of these, based on the strong experience of the one that precedes it, is so powerful that people (and other beings in their own way) are continually in the grip of this pattern. Because all of the twelve limbs are conditions upon which the others depend, if any of the conditions cease to exist, the entire cycle ceases to function. Release from this cycle of grasping and suffering is what the Buddha called nirvana.
Consumer craving depends upon feelings that arise following contact with objects in the sense fields. Feeling states in Buddhist psychology are usually categorized as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral/indifferent. Since feelings are impermanent, advertisers or sales agents need to keep restimulating potential buyers. This is done by generating a barrage of contact points for the sense organs: bite-sized food samples, billboards for alcohol, a storefront of blaring televisions. The point of contact is where the object of perception, sense organ and sense-consciousness come together. The seller provides the object; the consumer provides the already conditioned sense fields of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind.
What one perceives in the sense field is completely conditioned by one’s experience, and one gives that experience name and form. Name and form are conditioned by previous experiences, which mold consciousness and the forms it comes to take. Such conditioning is well documented for alcoholism and other addictive abuse patterns. Repeated use of alcohol changes a person physiologically to become more attracted to the states induced by alcohol. Apply this conditioning to other forms of excess consumption and the addictive cycle extends to luxury foods, brand-name clothing and TV soap operas. Accumulating over time, repeated patterning, or karmic formations, develop to produce generations of addiction.
Craving, in turn, perpetuates grasping. Enjoying pleasant experiences, one grasps for their continuation; abhorring unpleasant experiences, one grasps for their cessation. These forms of grasping are especially strong when one labels one’s identity in terms of that grasping (e.g. “I avoid meat; I’m a vegetarian”; or “I love mountain hiking; I’m a funhog”). Grasping generates becoming. The more one grasps after consumer goods or values, the more one becomes a consumer. This leads to birth of the self-identified ego that defines life primarily as consumption.
Eventually, of course, even the consumer must face death, with or without the comfort of familiar possessions. Thus, through the twelve limbs of codependent origination, consumer consciousness stays alive and well, taking new and diverse forms day after day. However, insight and liberation are close at hand in the very breaking of the strongly determining links. But how exactly does one do this?
My work with undergraduates at the University of Vermont has given me the chance to try a few experiments in consumer liberation. These exercises, modeled on a mindfulness approach, drew awareness to previously unexamined behaviors. For environmental studies students, American greed and consumer addictions are a source of moral anguish. I applied Buddhist liberative methods to student concerns in a new course I called Unlearning Consumerism. Each week the students undertook a lab exercise to evaluate some aspect of their consumption habits. My goal was to give students ways to explore the consciousness that arises from consumerism through self-study of their cultural conditioning.
One of our first exercises was the “property list.” This brought the students’ attention sharply to the physical reality of their lives. Each student had to make a list of all of their belongings, from underwear to electric guitars. The very act of listing everything was a practice in mindfulness, revealing excess and rationalization. In response, I set up support groups based on the Alcoholics Anonymous model around particularly troublesome areas. These groups were for coffee addiction, CD collecting, excess clothing and shoes, and television users. By the end of the course students testified to reducing their consumption in each of these areas.
The group also took up analyses of energy use, transportation habits and environmental impacts of food consumption. We relied on an excellent source. The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Students kept food logs for one week, recording where products came from and estimating the scale of environmental impact. They looked at their diets not from an individual caloric perspective but from estimated energy expense to the planet.
Because consumption messages are broadcast through so many mediums, I had students undertake a three-day technology fast. This fasting was a modern-day form of renunciation, as is undertaken in monastic traditions. The students had to give up their use of the Internet, the car, the television or another technology of their choice and then evaluate the impact it carried in their lives. Doing without was generally seen as a good exercise, though in some cases it affected their social lives and raised other dilemmas.
To study television in particular, students did a series of short exercises, taking notes on what they observed. First, they had to “watch” the TV for a half hour with the set turned off. This gave them some idea of the strange nature of their relationship with an electronic box. Then they had to observe other students watching TV. They realized that while watching TV, they too might look as lethargic and dull as some of the people they observed.
At the beginning of the course I had asked students to write a consumer autobiography, highlighting the tensions and addictions they had already encountered in their young lives. At the end they each wrote a personal credo, laying out their beliefs and ethical principles regarding consumption. The first exercise was perhaps a form of repentance ceremony, the second a simple form of personal vow-taking. For our final session we held a Great Give-Away, practicing generosity by passing along treasures to each other and giving anything left over to charity.
I think it is fair to say that consumerism is on a collision course with the limits of the planet, and the disease is spreading rapidly. If the planet (and therefore Buddhism) are to flourish in the future, we must take very seriously the environmental, cultural and psychological impacts of overconsumption. The liberative methods of the dharma provide powerful tools of analysis and practice which can help with this task. Given the omnipresent impacts of greed and aversion in all human lives, there will always be plenty of opportunity for practice. We need to do this work, literally for the sake of all beings – before consumerism gobbles up all that remains. We have choice in the matter – choice to wake up in the midst of the suffering. In observing the complexity of our own greed, we enter the possibilities for liberation one desire at a time.
Stephanie Kaw is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, where she teaches Buddhism and ecology. © 2002 by Stephanie Kaza.
Full Meltdown: Fukushima Called the ‘Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of Mankind’
Scientific experts believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.
Dahr Jamail
al-Jazeera: June 16, 2011
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
“The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”
Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive “hot spots” around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.
“We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”
Radiation monitors for children
Japan’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.
TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station – an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan – is now likely uninhabitable.
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
“There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children,” Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.
Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: “There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government’s 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well.”
Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.
“They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this,” he said. “The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days.”
According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as “hot particles”.
“We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo,” he said. “Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters.”
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.
The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.
“These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant,” he explained, “One cigarette doesn’t get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can’t measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April.”
Blame the US?
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama’s biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.
He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.
“Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes,” Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. “I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan.”
Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.
“Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use,” he explained. “The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy.”
As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.
“I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe,” he said. “Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity.”
A problem of infinite proportions
Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.
“But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor,” he added. “Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there’s no question about that.”
Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be “the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this”.
Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.
“They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid,” he said. “It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it’s going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids.”
Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.
“Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple,” he said. “After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you’re at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They’ve not figured out how to cool units three and four.”
Gundersen’s assessment of solving this crisis is grim.
“Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years,” he said. “Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn’t exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor.”
Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.
“Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations,” he explained. “To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.”
Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.
“So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water,” Gundersen said. “We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come.”
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen’s assessment.
“With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started,” he said, “But they never end.”
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight In Iraq and Afghanistan.
[FACT comments: Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) was founded in 2006 to petition Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission over govt’s Internet censorship. Our petition died because govt officials simply refused to attend.
We’ve decided to try again with the new, reconstituted NHRC. Our questions remain the same five years later: Show us the blocklist, show us the reasons. We know Internet censorship is not only illegal but unConstitutional—no laws can supersede the Thai Constitution.
Dr. Nirand chairs the NHRC subcommittee on civil and political rights. As Thailand is signatory to the UN’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the NHRC’s finding will put FACT in a good position to challenge Thai censorship at the United Nations.
In this five years, FACT has the added weight of being blocked itself. We hope to put these lumbering dinosaurs on the run.]
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand
กลุ่มเสรีภาพต่อต้านการเซ็นเซอร์แห่งประเทศไทย
18th March 2011
Dr. Niran Pitakwatchara, Commissioner
The National Human Rights Commission of Thailand
Government Complex
120 Chaengwattana Road, Laksi
Bangkok 10210
Dear Dr. Niran:
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) is a self-funded NGO created to root out censorship and its causes. Since FACT’s founding on November 15, 2006, FACT’s website has had nearly a million pageviews. FACT’s petition to the Thai government against all censorship now has 2,000 signers. And FACT has a mailing list of more than 10,000 concerned citizens.
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) has never hosted any content or comment which is illegal or even uncivil.
Despite our public reputation, on May 9, 2010, FACT’s website was blocked by Thailand’s censors under the emergency powers suspending the rule of law on April 7.
Netizens now encounter this military message when trying to access FACT at our public blogsite (URL: http://facthai.wordpress.com, IP address: http://76.74.254.123):
In private communication with MICT’s chief censor, Aree Jivorarak on December 8, he attached a copy of the April 10, 2010 CRES Orders 9.2 and 11.5. Any cursory reading of FACT’s website will show that FACT is not “generating fear, disseminating misinformation or creating misunderstanding of the state of emergency which will affect peace, morals or national security”. Khun Aree claimed that FACT’s website was blocked because we provided the means to circumvent Thai censorship. Yes, we do, and it’s one of our core platforms which we have no intention of removing but that is no rationale to block our website.
While government is very quick to block websites, no mechanism has been set up for the public to request unblocking when a site has been blocked in error. Nor is there any specified procedure for legal appeals through Thai courts to unblock a website.
We have written several letters and made dozens of phone calls as well as emails to the Minister of Information and Communication Technology, The Honourable Juti Krairiksh. All have gone unanswered.
We have also made scores of phone calls to the office of the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of national security, Suthep Thaugsuban, and the headquarters of CRES/CAPO, also to no result.
Our November 10 letter to the Prime Minister has similarly gone unanswered.
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) is certainly no threat to Thailand’s national security. Furthermore, we find it most ironic that Thai government is blocking an anti-censorship group!
We are attaching to this letter all documents referred to above as well as a complete list to date of FACT signers and international freedom of expression partners.
While rule of law may have been suspended in Thailand, we do not wish to believe that human rights and dignity have also been discarded.
FACT is petitioning the Commission to order all Thai government authorities to immediately remove any interference, censorship and blocking of our website.
We are also at pains to point out that, even though government has lifted the state of emergency from all but three provinces and the capital as of October 1, it has not restored the Computer Crimes Act 2007 to the rest of Thailand. No government agency has petitioned for court orders to censor since the decree was lifted, yet the entire country remains under massive censorship.
After the state of emergency was lifted for Bangkok on December 22, all censorship initiated under the Emergency Decree is still in place.
We also call on the commission to investigate the wider issue of Internet censorship by Thai government on an enormous scale.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
CJ Hinke, Coordinator
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)
Dr. Ubonrat Siriyuwasak
Faculty of Mass Communications
Chulalongkorn University
