Madison's "Tractorcade" protest refocuses WI outrage

Clogging the Wisconsin Capitol grounds and screaming angry chants, tens of thousands of undaunted pro-labor protesters descended on Madison again Saturday and vowed to focus on future elections now that contentious cuts to public worker union rights have become law.

"This is so not the end," said protester Judy Gump, a 45-year-old English teacher at Madison Memorial High School. "This is what makes people more determined and makes them dig in."

The day began with a morning "Farmer Labor Tractorcade" that circled (Wisconsin's Capitol) Square with antique tractors and farmers who led the chants of "Show me what democracy looks like!" and “Recall Walker!"

Early afternoon saw "Art Workers March Together", aka "The Blue Tape Brigade". Lavishly decorated in the type of tape used to affix posters to the Capitol’s wall, around 100 actors, painters, musicians and others marched from the Overture Center to the gathering on the Square, beating drums and carrying possibly the largest and most elaborately constructed palm tree yet.

Of course, the highlight of the day was unquestionably the return of the 14 Senate Democrats. An overflow crowd that packed the Square and several State Street blocks greeted the returning senators like celebrities, chanting: "Thank you! Thank you!" and "Welcome home!"

Update: Tractorcade, the video.

Let me remind you of something.

When it comes to nuclear incidents (and accidents) the owners of the facility, government officials, and media all lie. If they can't cover up an incident they will minimize it.

When a serious crisis such as we are seeing in Japan occurs, the danger is repeatedly mitigated.

We've seen this pattern for decades. Minor releases of radioactive material are covered up for years, if not forever. Major incidents such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are downplayed, sometimes to ludicrous extents, until the extent of the devastation simply can't be hidden anymore. And even afterward reports of the event mostly marginalize the damage and the scope. Proponents of nuclear power in the United States like to point to TMI and say that no deaths occurred, all the while ignoring the fact that there are cancer clusters surrounding the downwind side of TMI, one full of thyroid cancers and childhood leukemia.

We're seeing the same game being played out in Japan. Since the reactor building at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor in Sendai, Japan exploded yesterday, the damage and worsening threat has been consistently underemphasized. Vague statements that were meant to be reassuring were issued, and all the buzz words were used. First we read that there was one reactor in danger, then two ... then five. Officials assured us that they could control the overheated core. Then we were told that a cloud of "slightly" radioactive steam was released. Radiation levels around the plant went up, then went down. All this while more and more people near the site were evacuated.

Since most people don't carry around a Geiger counter, officials feel that they can get away with minimizing the impact, and thus people nearest the accident are led to believe they can risk some amount of environmental exposure. Only later will we learn ("through the Internet" only, at first) that the damage, risks, and fallout -- literally as well as figuratively -- were much, much worse than anyone in charge disclosed. Since radiation poisoning only kills immediately with close exposure at dangerous levels, the plant and government officials will continue to say that all is well, nobody has died, the danger is over, etc. But radiation at low levels or exposure at a great distance over a long period can also kill. It just happens slowly, over a long period of time ... as in the next generation, even. Years after the incident, cancer clusters begin to pop up and people die prematurely.Particularly children.

Nuclear power has been shoved down the throats of the people in this world for the past sixty years despite the dangers, despite the threats, despite the fact that it is no longer by any reasonable measure an economical way to produce large amounts of electricity. A small group of powerful people have a vested monetary interest in continuing the nuclear path, and when disaster occurs they are able to exert their influence to put out the myths, spin the facts, and advance the lies and propaganda.

Don't fall for it. The evidence of nuclear's dangers are apparent in the cancer clusters of Pennsylvania. They are evident in a 2,800-square mile dead zone in Ukraine. And they are being played out for us now, on the eastern coast of Japan.

Update: This is what I'm talking about.

Nuclear meltdown likely happening at Japanese reactor

A meltdown may be under way at one of Fukushima Daiichi's nuclear power reactors in northern Japan, an official with Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told CNN Sunday.

"There is a possibility, we see the possibility of a meltdown," said Toshihiro Bannai, director of the agency's international affairs office, in a telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Tokyo. "At this point, we have still not confirmed that there is an actual meltdown, but there is a possibility."

Though he said engineers have been unable to get close enough to the core to know what's going on, he based his conclusion on the fact that they measured radioactive cesium and radioactive iodine in the air Saturday night.

"What we have seen is only the slight indication from a monitoring post of cesium and iodine," he said. Since then, he said, plant officials have injected sea water and boron into the plant in an effort to cool its nuclear fuel.

The reported presence of Cesium 127 was disturbing, experts agreed, because it was evidence that the core had overheated, if only for a portion of time. The radioactive debris is produced when the core is exposed above the coolant water level and overheats. One of the other potential by-products of such overheating is hydrogen. Hydrogen is believed to be the cause of the blast at Fukushima.

How bad might it get? Bergeron says, "if the core does melt, then it will slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, melt through to into the containment floor" which will lead to that safety measure to fail. "It's likely to spread like a molten pool to the edge of the steel shell and melt through." You could have containment failure in less than a day." Then the core would exposed to the external environment. In that worst-case scenario, the only thing that can be done is to entomb the melted core in sand and cement, much as was done in Chernobyl. Said Bergeron, "A lot of first responders will die."