On a heavily populated island in the Pacific, the world's third largest economy, the world is shaking. Call it 3/11 for the March 11th date when four reactors started their journey to explosions and runaway radiation at the Fukushima reactors in Japan.

Your life will never be the same. Right now, listeners outside Japan are asking "Are we safe?" What about the drinking water, milk, food? Should we buy Japanese products?

This is Alex Smith for Radio Ecoshock. I have a mountain of news you should know - and a few warning about false information on the Net. Some disinformation came from the Japanese government, to calm you down. Then there is creative blogging and conspiracy believers who want to frighten and inform. Read about that, or listen to it, in my previous blog entry "Fukushima Fact & Fantasy".

There is so much we don't know. In this special Radio Ecoshock Show for April 29th, I'll try to keep to the credible. It's loaded with the under-reported news stories, plus English-language clips from Asian TV.

The information is necessary but complex. You can follow along with my written notes, and all the supporting links in the transcript link below. And download this program as a free mp3 here:
 http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock11/ES_110429_Show_LoFi.mp3

THE REAL SITUATION NOW

The real situation now depends on where you live.

For Japan, as you will soon learn, the radiation is much worse than reported. My opinion is: the government is verging on criminal acts by withholding vital information from the Japanese people, leaving more people in irradiated zones, eating irradiated food, while running other nuclear reactors with the same risk or worse.

Even now, a French official is being criminally charged of withholding information about the seriousness of Chernobyl radiation to the detriment of French citizens.

For the worried people in North America and Europe the situation is slightly better. So long as there are no further explosions taking heavy radioactive isotopes into the upper atmosphere, what crosses the Pacific will be bad, but livable.

As I will explain next, with the latest news, there is a lot that could go wrong. We could still see more waves of radioactive elements, similar to the one which hit North America's West Coast in the week March 18th to 23rd, and Europe a week later. Don't let this new story slip out of your attention.

The news for the Pacific ocean, and all the fish, whales, and creatures there, is very bad. Every week sees a new and worse announcement of rising radiation released into the ocean. Everything points to this pollution continuing for months, if
not years or decades. We don't know where that leads.

Let's start with this question:

WHAT IS THE RISK OF ANOTHER BIG BURST OF RADIATION INTO THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE?

READ MORE (the program transcript with all supporting links) here:
href=" http://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/ES_110429_Transcript.htm

Find the transcript and links for the bonus feature, "Fukushima Fact & Fantasy" here:
 http://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/ES_110429_Fuku_Fantasy_Script.htm