As the prestigious scientific journal Nature notes:
Shortly after a
massive tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11
March, an unmanned monitoring station on the outskirts of Takasaki,
Japan, logged a rise in radiation levels. Within 72 hours, scientists
had analysed samples taken from the air and transmitted their analysis
to Vienna, Austria — the headquarters of the Preparatory Commission for
the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), an
international body set up to monitor nuclear weapons tests.
It was
just the start of a flood of data collected about the accident by the
CTBTO's global network of 63 radiation monitoring stations. In the
following weeks, the data were shared with governments around the world,
but not with academics or the public.
The attempted cover up of the
severity of the Fukushima disaster is nothing new. Governments have been
covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years, and the basic design for
nuclear reactors was not chosen for safety, but because it worked on
Navy submarines ... and produced plutonium for the military.
(Indeed, the government's response to every crisis appears to be to try to cover it up; and see this.)
Today, Yomiuri Shinbun reports (Google translation) that the U.S. knew within days that Fukushima had melted down:
The
subject of evacuating the US citizens was raised in the early hours on
March 16 (local time). The US ... already knew about the unusually high
temperature of the reactors from the Global Hawk data, and determined
that "the fuel has already melted".
***
The US high-ranking
officials wanted to evacuate the US citizens [Tokyo] but the local
officials including Maher objected, as "it would severely undermine the
US-Japan alliance"
(The Global Hawk is an unmanned aerial aircraft).
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