The USS Ronald Reagan

Toll Mounts Among U.S. Sailors Devastated by Fukushima Radiation

Harvey Wasserman

Eco Watch

11 January, 2014

The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar.

So many have come forward that the progress of their federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.

Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait until early February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships.

U.S. sailors irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke say their health has been devastated.

Within a day of Fukushima One’s March 11, 2011, melt-down, American “first responders” were drenched in radioactive fallout. In the midst of a driving snow storm, sailors reported a cloud of warm air with a metallic taste that poured over the Reagan.

Then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan, at the time a nuclear supporter, says “the first meltdown occurred five hours after the earthquake.” The lawsuit charges that Tokyo Electric Power knew large quantities of radiation were pouring into the air and water, but said nothing to the Navy or the public. 

Had the Navy known, says Bonner, it could have moved its ships out of harm’s way. But some sailors actually jumped into the ocean just offshore to pull victims to safety. Others worked 18-hour shifts in the open air through a four-day mission, re-fueling and repairing helicopters, loading them with vital supplies and much more. All were drinking and bathing in desalinated water that had been severely contaminated by radioactive fallout and runoff.

Then Reagan crew members were enveloped in a warm cloud. “Hey,” joked sailor Lindsay Cooper at the time. “It’s radioactive snow.”
  

The metallic taste that came with it parallels the ones reported by the airmen who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and by Pennsylvania residents downwind from the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island. 

When it did leave the Fukushima area, the Reagan was so ra dioactive it was refused port entry in Japan, South Korea and Guam. It’s currently docked in San Diego.

The Navy is not systematically monitoring the crew members’ health problems. But Cooper now reports a damaged thyroid, disrupted menstrual cycle, wildly fluctuating body weight and more. “It’s ruined me,” she says.

Similar complaints have surfaced among so many sailors from the Reagan and other U.S. ships that Bonner says he’s being contacted by new litigants “on a daily basis,” with the number exceeding 70.

Many are in their twenties, complaining of a terrible host of radiation-related diseases. They are legally barred from suing the U.S. military. Tepco denies that any of their health problems could be related to radiation from Fukushima. The company also says the U.S. has no jurisdiction in the case.

The suit was initially dismissed on jurisdictional grounds by federal Judge Janis S. Sammartino in San Diego. Sammartino was due to hear the re-filing Jan. 6, but allowed the litigants another month to accommodate additional sailors.

Bonner says Tepco should be subject to U.S. law because “they are doing business in America … Their second largest office outside of Tokyo is in Washington DC.”

Like the lawsuit, the petitions ask that Tepco admit responsibility, and establish a fund for the first responders to be administered by the U.S. courts.

In 2013 more than 150,000 citizens petitioned the United Nations to take control of the Fukushima site to guarantee the use of the best possible financial, scientific and engineering resources in the attempted clean-up. 

The melted cores from Units One, Two and Three are still unaccounted for. Progress in bringing down Unit Four’s suspended fuel assemblies is murky at best. More than 11,000 “hot” rods are still scattered around a site where radiation levels remain high and some 300 tons of radioactive water still flow daily into the Pacific.

But with U.S. support, Japan has imposed a state secrets act severely restricting reliable news reporting from the Fukushima site.

So now we all live in the same kind of dark that enveloped the USS Reagan while its crew was immersed in their mission of mercy.

Petitions in the sailors’ support are circulating worldwide on NukeFree.org, MoveOn, Avaaz,RootsAction and elsewhere.

Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org, where petitions calling for the repeal of Japan’s State Secrets Act and a global takeover at Fukushima are linked. He is author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth.

Maryland Man Blames Radiation At Fukushima

ENE News,

12 January, 2014

WUSA Channel 9, Jan. 11, 2014: Wheelchair-Bound Sailor blames radiation exposure at Fukushima [...] He served his country, but has his country turned it’s back on him? [...] Steve [Simmons] was 33. That’s when life started changing for this U.S. Naval Administrative Officer. It was eight months after Simmons served on the USS Ronald Reagan [...] Steve said his list of ailments was puzzling [...]  Doctors could not [explain it]. Steve’s leg muscles eventually just gave up, and he’s now confined to a wheelchair to get around [...] The Department of Defense says radiation levels were safe, and were the equivalent to less than a month’s exposure tothe same natural radiation you pick up from being near rocks, soil and the sun. Steve doesn’t buy that [...] [His wife] Summer says they have to face the facts [...] Summer says they desperately want to give their three children a home where, after Steve’s gone, they can feel their father’s presence there. [...]

Summer Simmons: “I was just in shock [...] This has progressed and no one wants to think about their mortality but realistically we don’t know how much time we have left together.”

Lt. j.g. Steve Simmons, U.S. Navy: “I blacked out on Route 50 and drove my truck up on a curb. [...] You’re starting to run fevers, your lymph nodes start swelling, you’re having night sweats, you’re getting spastic, and you’re losing sensation in your legs, and you can’t feel your legs when you’re getting 2nd degree burns on them. How do you explain those things? [...] As far as the big picture we still don’t have a diagnosis of what this is, still struggling to even get a doctor to acknowledge that radiation had anything to do with it. [...] How do you take a ship and place it into a nuclear plume for five plus hours, how do you suck up nuclear contaminated waste into the water filtration system and think for one minute that there’s no health risk to anybody on board?”

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, radiation’s effects expert: “I feel badly about it, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that it has anything to do with radiation exposure. There’s no toxic agent that we can measure as precise as radiation. It’s very unlikely that the Department of Defense would not have precise data on this.”