US Carrier Crew Poisoned At Fukushima

By James Donahue

At least 51 crew members on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan have reportedly been hit with various forms of cancer within three years after the ship anchored off Northern Japan in March, 2011, to give aide to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami stricken nuclear power plants.

At least another 150 crew members involved in the rescue operation also are being medically screened for possible cancers and other side effects, according to a report in the news publication Al Jazeera.

The 51 known victims have been diagnosed with conditions that include thyroid cancer, testicular cancer and leukemia. A class action lawsuit is pending naming the U. S. Navy, the Tokyo Electric Power Company among the defendants. The sailors and their families are seeking $40 million each in punitive damages plus a one billion dollar fund for future medical expenses facing the Reagan’s crew members.

The Department of Defense argues that the Navy took “proactive measures” to “mitigate the levels of Fukushima-related contamination on U.S. Navy ships and aircraft” that participated in the rescue mission.

What was unknown to naval personnel at the time was the dangerous extent of damage that had occurred at three of the nuclear power plants and that high volumes of toxic cooling water was pouring from the damaged buildings directly into the sea where the carrier was moored.

Some of the crew members reportedly jumped directly into the water to assist in the rescue mission. Also, the Reagan is equipped with an onboard desalinization system that removes salt from seawater to make it drinkable. The system does not, however, remove nuclear toxins. Thus everybody on the carrier was drinking radioactive water. They also were cooking their food and showering in the toxic water.

The USS Reagan was anchored about ten miles offshore from the affected region for about a month before the crew was informed that the water around the ship was contaminated.

What remains unclear is just how big this naval medical contamination was. A carrier the size of the Reagan deploys well over 3,000 sailors and pilots. All of these people would also have been exposed to the contaminated drinking water and food. Also navy aircraft carriers usually always are accompanied by a supporting fleet of ships that should also have been standing somewhere in the same area.

Since the USS Reagan is a nuclear powered ship, we wonder how the vessel could anchor in nuclear contaminated waters without some kind of built-in warning system sounding an alert to the danger. 

We suspect that there is much more to the story than we have been told.