Günther Oettinger, Europe\’s energy commissioner, said: \”There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen. Practically everything is out of control. I cannot exclude the worst in the hours and days to come.\”
No, it\’s not a particularly well chosen word. For we\’re still, even now, at the stage where panic will do more damage than the actual problem itself.
Note who\’s talking here:
Francois Baroin, a French government spokesman, went further, saying: \”In the worst of cases, it could have an impact worse than Chernobyl.\” He added: \”They have visibly lost the essential of control.\”
Malcolm Grimston, a British nuclear expert at the Chatham House think tank, played down suggestions of an impending disaster, saying Fukushima was not like Chernobyl.
\”We\’re nearly five days after the fission process was stopped, the levels of radioactive iodine will only be about two–thirds of where they were at the start, some of the other, very short–lived, very radioactive material will be gone altogether by now,\” he said.
Earlier, Nathalie Kosciusko–Morizet, France\’s ecology minister, had said that \”the worst scenario is possible and even probable\”.
A bureaucrat and an environmentalist say it\’s terrible. An expert says, well, hang on a minute……
They’re desperate for a disaster.
It’s really about constructing a narrative, or a hegemonic discourse, or what have you. When the disaster fails to materialise, it will be the generally received wisdom that an apocalypse was only very narrowly averted.
No other way to say it – these people are cunts, and add even more to our need to get the fuck out of the EU before the Bureuacratariat swallows us alive.
Ian B nails it.
And it’s not hyperbole to say that, if there was any way of nudging that disaster along, some of these ecoloons would do it in a heartbeat…
I had a delivery yesterday, and the lorry driver was waxing lyrical about how ‘they’ had been saying on the radio that ‘it was about to blow’. He had the idea that entire place was about to go up in a mushroom cloud. That’s the level of misinformation the MSM are peddling.
@Jim
“That’s the level of misinformation the MSM are peddling.”
Unfortunately it’s worse than that: the MSM has plausible deniability. If you were to confront any journalist with that, he would laugh at you and say “don’t be ridiculous – I never even remotely suggested this would go off like a bomb”.
The problem is that the problem – and vitally that what’s happening in Japan <<<< what happened at Chernobyl <<<< a nuclear bomb – is not explained clearly enough.
Your truck driver thinks – partly because he is so poorly served by the MSM see above – that
a) all nuclear reactors are equal
b) all incidents are equal
c) nuclear reactor = nuclear bomb.
This is indeed the fault of the MSM, butit's a much longer term failure and you would struggle to be able to pin it on the reporting of this particular incident.
I have colleagues here with family that were in the exclusion zone, we’re watching people say this stuff on TV, they are terrified. I have to point out to them (them being fresh here from Japan and all) that this Professor, well he is a professor of television studies (whose wife is an antinuclear campaigner), this doctor discussing the details of reactor cooling is a doctor of pediatric cardiology (and long time antinuclear campaigner) and this other “professor” is just some nutcase who may have invented the title but in any case hasn’t practiced clinical medicine or worked as an academic in any field for three decades. In fact has spent all that time running political campaigns. You think the media have any insight into any of this???
As you note, in the vanguard of those misreporting Fukushima is the Telegraph which has been ratcheting up the scare quotient daily. I wonder if Geoffrey Lean and Louise Gray (the queen of the press release who today is relaying another load of cod from the DECC http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8386273/Shadow-flicker-rotating-blades-can-cause-headaches.html ) have been strongarming the Telegraph’s editor and the Barclay Brothers to get this crap on to the front page. OTOH, following the possible trail of money as to why the Telegraph should indulge in sensationalist scare-mongering, is it possible that the brothers have invested in other – non-nuclear – technologies which can create more immediate flows of substantial taxpayer provided funds to their lucky owners?
Shadow flicker and headaches? I’d have guessed that shadow flicker and epileptic fits was a bigger worry.