Japanese government submits report to IAEA on Fukushima nuclear catastrophe

The federal government of Japan has transmitted a 750 page report to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of an IAEA Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety, being held at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna, Austria from June 20 to 24. Although called "preliminary," the report represents the single most comprehensive assessment compiled by the Japanese government since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe began on March 11th. An overview summarizes the report's main findings. It must be borne in mind that the IAEA's schizophrenic mandate is to promote nuclear energy as "atoms for peace," while also preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given that fatally flawed internal contradiction, risks of atomic energy often get downplayed, to put it mildly. For example, a 1957 "Memorandum of Understanding" between the IAEA and World Health Organization gives the IAEA an effective veto over WHO on any radiation health related matter, leading to such outrages as IAEA/WHO maintaining for 20 (1986 to 2006) years that just a few dozen people had died from Chernobyl's radioactivity releases (in 2006, IAEA/WHO upped the figure to 4,000, still far below Alexey Yablokov's figure of nearly a million deaths due to Chernobyl between 1986 and 2004). It should not be surprising, then, that IAEA has invoked secrecy on its Fukushima nuclear catastrophe meeting (see Bloomberg article)!