The
Japanese Mob Is Hiring Homeless People to Clean Up Fukushima
30
December
Nearly
three years after an earthquake and tsunami caused the greatest
nuclear disaster in decades, Japan is still in the early days of its
massive Fukushima cleanup effort. Powering the cleanup of the fallout
zone is an army of workers making $60 a day to decontaminate the
region.
Now,
where do you find people willing to work in a fallout zone for
minimum wage? According to a Reuters report, hidden within hundreds
of contractors working on the cleanup effort are yakuza-controlled
companies that pay headhunters to find homeless people willing to
work inside the fallout zone.
The
sheer scale of the cleanup effort is staggering. While
decontaminating the Fukushima plant itself will cost tens of billions
and take years, there are also the surrounding areas in Fukushima
prefecture, where cleanup costs are expected to top $30 billion. With
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the owner of the Fukushima plant,
essentially nationalized at this point, Reuters reports that there's
some $35 billion in taxpayer funds on the table for contractors.
That's
turned the Fukushima cleanup into something of a boom industry, with
a number of shady entities trying to score a piece of the pie. Some
highlights from the newest Reuters report, which is definitely worth
reading in full:
Members
of Japanese organized crime were arrested three times this year "on
charges of infiltrating construction giant Obayashi Corp's network of
decontamination subcontractors and illegally sending workers to the
government-funded project," which in some cases were homeless
people hired by recruiters paid bounties on each minimum-wage worker
they could sign up.
Obayashi,
Japan's second-largest construction company, isn't accused of
wrongdoing; the subcontractors implicated in arrests were as many as
three companies removed from Obayashi itself. How does that happen?
There are hundreds of companies involved in the cleanup effort, and
oversight is lacking.
The
total number of companies received taxpayer funds hasn't been
released. "But in the 10 most contaminated towns and a highway
that runs north past the gates of the wrecked plant in Fukushima,"
reads the report, "Reuters found 733 companies were performing
work for the Ministry of Environment, according to partial contract
terms released by the ministry in August under Japan's information
disclosure law.
Reuters
found 56 subcontractors that shouldn't be allowed to be given
government contracts because they didn't have proper clearances from
Japan's construction clearances. Five firms listed on the Japanese
Environment Ministry's list of cleanup contractors don't even exist.
With
a project that's unprecedented in scope, and one that's been rushed
from the start, it's to be expected that there will be some level of
waste. After all, finding experienced contractors to bid against each
other is a lot easier for a road construction project than it is for
nuclear disaster cleanup. But the morass of sketchy contracting
companies and sheer lack of oversight as described by Reuters is
astounding.
But
that lack of oversight isn't particularly surprising. A previous
Reuters report found much of the same: With flat wage growth and few
workers willing to take on the cleanup, hundreds of subcontractors
have filled positions by relying on recruiters willing to find labor
from anywhere.
The
oversight problem isn't limited to labor, either: Earlier this year,
the Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) downgraded the
Fukushima disaster to its worst rating since its initial
post-earthquake peak, thanks to the finding that temporary tanks for
storing radioactive waste were leaking at the power plant site. At
the time, the NRA said it wasn't sure if Japan could manage the
cleanup on its own.
"The
current situation is at the point where more surveillance won't be
enough to keep the accidents from happening," NRA chairman
Shunichi Tanaka told reporters at the time. "Our job is now to
lower the risk of these accidents from becoming fatal."
Along
with the leaks from storage tanks, a number of massive leaks have
come from the Fukushima site, largely ending up in the Pacific. At
the center of those problems is Tepco, which remains the authority
controlling the decontamination of the Fukushima reactors, and which
has consistently failed to maintain proper records and standards,
even following billion-dollar injections of government cash.
In
October, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his country was open
to receiving international assistance, which came after a series of
international calls for exactly that. It's unclear what form that
might take, but having a stronger authority overseeing the project
may help. Whether it's the power plant or the surrounding prefecture,
it's becoming increasingly clear that the Japanese government has
shown a severe lack of oversight of the Fukushima cleanup.
Former
MSNBC host told not to warn people about Fukushima meltdowns: “The
official gov’t position is that it’s safe”
“Now
go explain that to people who served on the USS Ronald Reagan”
30
December
The
Young Turks,
Dec. 29, 2013:
At
2:15 in
Cenk Uygur, co-host: I was on MSNBC at the time when this happened, I said, “Don’t trust what the Japanese government is saying, they’ll say trust what the electric power company is saying. Go, go, go, get outta there. Get as far away from that plant as you can. It’s literally a core meltdown.” And they always don’t want people to panic, so they were always like, “Oh it’s going to be okay.” [...] I’m like, “You’re crazy man, don’t be anywhere near that reactor.” And I remember at the time, of course not at The Young Turks, but on cable news, people were like, “Hey Cheynk, you know, I don’t know that you want to say that, because the official government position is that it’s safe.” Oh, is that the official government position? Now go explain that to the people who served on the USS Ronald Reagan.
At
5:45 in
Uygur: So the next time you hear the government tell you, “Oh no, no, this is our official position that it’s not that bad to be near the nuclear meltdown,” don’t believe the hype. Get the hell out of there.
LA Times: Experts suggest bald eagle deaths are related to Fukushima radiation — Idaho officials reporting similar sickness — “It’s hard to have your national bird in your arms, going through seizures” (AUDIO)
Fukushima
News 12/30/13: Fukushima Cleanup a "Comedy Of Errors";
Radiation Fears & Japan's Seafood
Fukushima
Reaching Point Zero
12/31/13 Forcast US & Canada 1501 Nuclear Atoms Per Meter³ Air
Unit 3 Mox Fuel is two million times more dangerous than any other reactor on earth , is spewing new Death Plumes , meaning new death streams . We will get them here in BC Canada tonight and yesterday and tomorrow etc etc . Think of the Death Streams like a big ground swell after a storm at sea that continues for thousands of miles till it slams into a few 1000 miles of coast line . The jet streams are distributing a percentage of those buckyballs all along the way and they hang there and get picked up by lower wind currents and carried along and picked back up in rain and snow or again by the jet stream like a continues flow we can not see , hear , smell , feel or taste . So how will you know how much , well its been a state secret for over a 1000 days , do you think its because nothing happened or do you think its because something is happening constantly and a hand full of people decided no one can tell you .
Fukushima
breaking news; Bald Eagles DEAD in Utah; Kevin D. Blanch 12/30/13
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