Sailors of USS Ronald Reagan exposed to radaition

Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

TEPCO has found a record 1.9 million becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances at its No.2 reactor. Also radioactive cesium was detected in deeper groundwater at No.4 unit’s well, as fears grow of a new leak into the ocean.

NY Post,

22 December, 2013

Navy sailor Lindsay Cooper knew something was wrong when billows of metallic-tasting snow began drifting over USS Ronald Reagan.

“I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air, and, suddenly, it was snowing,” Cooper recalled of the day in March 2011 when she and scores of crewmates watched a sudden storm blow toward them from the tsunami-torn coast of Fukushima, Japan.

The tall 24-year-old with a winning smile didn’t know it then, but the snow was caused by the freezing Pacific air mixing with a plume of radioactive steam from the city’s shattered nuclear reactor.

Now, nearly three years after their deployment on a humanitarian mission to Japan’s ravaged coast, Cooper and scores of her fellow crew members on the aircraft carrier and a half-dozen other support ships are battling cancers, thyroid disease, uterine bleeding and other ailments.

“We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!’ ” Cooper recalled. “I took pictures and video.”

But now “my thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next,” said Cooper, fighting tears. “My menstrual cycle lasts for six months at a time, and I cannot get pregnant. It’s ruined me.”

The fallout of those four days spent off the Fukushima coast has been tragic to many of the 5,000 sailors who were there.

At least 70 have been stricken with some form of radiation sickness, and of those, “at least half . . . are suffering from some form of cancer,” their lawyer, Paul Garner, told The Post Saturday.

NY Post: Snow falling on Navy ship caused by Fukushima radioactive steam… “Is that aluminum foil I taste?”

• Sailor: People were defecating on themselves in hallways from excruciating diarrhea
• Officer: We saw radiation 300 times ‘safe’ levels

ENENews,

22 December, 2013

New York Post, Dec. 22, 2013: Navy sailor Lindsay Cooper knew something was wrong when billows of metallic-tasting snow began drifting over USS Ronald Reagan. [...] she and scores of crewmates watched a sudden storm blow toward them from the tsunami-torn coast of Fukushima, Japan. The tall 24-year-old with a winning smile didn’t know it then, but the snow was caused by the freezing Pacific air mixing with a plume of radioactive steam [...] Senior Chief Michael Sebourn, a radiation-decontamination officer, was assigned to test the aircraft carrier for radiation. The levels were incredibly dangerous and at one point, the radiation in the air measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe, Sebourn told The Post.

Lindsay Cooper, Navy sailor aboard USS Ronald Reagan during 3/11 rescue operation: “I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air, and, suddenly, it was snowing [...] We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow! I took pictures and video [...] Japan didn’t want us in port, Korea didn’t want us, Guam turned us away. We floated in the water for two and a half months [until Thailand took them in] “People were s- -tting themselves in the hallways [All the while crew members had been suffering from excruciating diarrhea].”

Cooper interviewed by EON, published Dec. 20, 2013: (at 4:30 in) “As soon as you step foot on the flight deck and went outside you had this taste of like aluminum foil.”[...] (at 10:45 in) We thought that we had felt a plume because there was kind of this warm air that went past the ship and you could kind of tell the differences between jet exhaust — we didn’t have any jets going around at the time. It was like 20 degrees outside and you could feel this warm air and you kind of enjoyed it at first and then you’re like, ‘Is that aluminum foil that I taste?’