Japan
Until the Fukushima accident, Japan had 55 operating nuclear reactors as well as enrichment and reprocessing plants which had suffered a series of deadly accidents at its nuclear facilities resulting in the deaths of workers and releases of radioactivity into the environment and surrounding communities. Since the Fukushima disaster, there is growing opposition against re-opening those reactors closed for maintenance.
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March 10, 2012 "Let’s move all of our governments to put an end to nuclear power. We appeal to all citizens in the world to come out on the street, make a human chain, and participate in this creative action. With one voice: “Let’s Support Fukushima! ” and “Good Bye to Nukes" More.
March 10, 2012 Sachiko Sato recounts the difficulties of living with radioactive contamination; the rifts it causes among families, the extreme measures needed to avoid health impacts, the difficulties in finding a new life, job, and friends in the wake of relocation. Here.
March 3, 2012 A heartbreaking BBC News Asia video focuses on Ayaka, a young girl who lost her grandfather and home to the tsunami in Fukushima Prefecture on March 11, 2011, and whose life is now circumscribed by radiation precautions that limit her freedom to play outdoors. This, despite now living beyond the arbitrarily small 12.4 mile (20 km) "Dead Zone" around the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Her father bought a Ukrainian radiation monitor on the internet, which he uses to check background levels before he lets Ayaka play on the parking lot for at most 30 minutes, only on weekends. She's not allowed to play on the grass, or near trees or surface water, because the radiation levels are higher there. Ayaka also wears a face mask on her way to school, and a personal radiation monitor to track her exposures. Ayaka reads from her diary entry from March 13, 2011, in which she expresses her fear of the invisible radioactivity around her. Writing helped her deal with her emotions -- she was afraid to express her fears directly to her father or grandmother.
March 3, 2012 On March 1st, the Thom Hartmann Show hosted Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps to discuss a Common Dreams article reporting that estimates of how much hazardous radioactive Cesium has escaped the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex have doubled -- again. This is the third major doubling of estimates since the catastrophe began. (Kevin's interview is from minute 30:30 to minute 38:20).
Thom also asked Kevin what a becquerel is, to give some understanding and perspective on the "mind-boggling" estimate that 40,000 trillion (or 40 quadrillion) becquerels of radioactive Cesium have escaped into the environment from Fukushima Daiichi. A becquerel is a unit of measurement of radioactivity, equal to one disintegration per second. A becquerel is the SI (International System of Units) derived unit used to measure the rate of radioactive decay. When the nucleus of an atom emits nucleons (protons and/or neutrons) and is thereby transformed into a different nucleus, decay has occurred. A decay rate of one becquerel for a given quantity means there is one such atomic transformation per second. The unit of measurement is named after Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), the French physicist who discovered the photographic action of the rays spontaneously emitted by uranium salts, and so instigated the study of radioactivity. His work led to the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie, with whom he shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics. As Kevin said during the interview, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has affirmed for decades that any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how small, carries a health risk of cancer. Thus, 40 quadrillion becquerels of radioactivity represent that many rolls of the dice, or rounds of radioactive Russian roulette, for people and other living things living downwind, downstream, and up the food chain.
