Fukushima Symposium 2013 – Steven Starr says: “Long lived radio-nuclides such as Cesium 137 are something new to us as a species. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy, that we might compare to fire. It’s not a fire that can be scattered of suffocated because it burns at the atomic level, it comes from the disintegration of single atoms”.
Starr gives an update as to what people in Japan are facing now and into the future. He explains how Cesium 137 is created in the Nuclear Power Plant and how it disperses and continues to move. How it enters the body, mainly via contaminated food, and bio-accumulates in humans, plants and animals. He refers to studies of the Chernobyl disaster and lists the organs affected and the diseases caused by Cesium 137. He takes issue with regulations that set unacceptably low exposure standards and ignore the added danger from Cesium 137 that lodges inside the body and creates a long active source of exposure.
Starr is Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Clinical Laboratory Science Program Director at the University of Missouri. He was recorded on March 11, 2013 at the New York Academy of Medicine. The Fukushima Symposium presented two days of medicine, environmental science and nuclear engineering related to the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. The Helen Caldicott Foundation organized the event, cosponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
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