Beyond Nuclear

Although reported by Reuters on April 1st, it is unfortunately not an April Fool's Day joke. The Japanese national and Fukushima prefectural governments have allowed a small number of residents to re-occupy their homes within the 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) evacuation zone around the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant today.

While the article compares the radioactivity levels in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan to Denver, Colorado, USA, it does not specify whether or not the Denver radioactivity levels include plutonium fallout from catastrophic fires at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory upwind in 1957 and 1969. And while the article reports that a Tokyo to New York jetliner flight exposes passengers to higher hourly radiation exposures, it neglects to mention the difference between external, natural (cosmic) radioactivity exposures over just several hours, versus internal exposures to artificial radioactive isotopes (such as tritium lodged near DNA molecules, Cs-137 in heart and thyroid tissue, Sr-90 in bone, Pu-239 in lung tissue, etc.) for the rest of one's life.

The article reports that while in evacuation shelters for the past three years, due to their parents' fear of radioactivity exposures, the children of Tamura have gotten only 30 minutes per day of outdoor play time, much less than most prison inmates in the U.S. are allowed in outdoor recreational time each day. How much outdoor play time the handful of children returning to Tamura will be allowed now that they are back in their radioactively contaminated homes, is unclear.

The article reports:

'...Kitaro Saito, who is in his early 60s, will stay outside Miyakoji, despite wanting to return to his large hillside house there, because he thinks the government is using residents as "guinea pigs" to test if more people can return home.

' "Relatives are arguing over what to do," he said, warming his hands outside his temporary home among rows of other one-room trailers. "The town will be broken up." ' (emphasis added)

Recently, Mari Takenouchi, a reporter and founder of Save Kids Japan, was officially charged with criminal contempt by a member of the nuclear industry-affiliated group called "ETHOS" after she also described the treatment of nuclear evacuees as akin to "guinea pigs," among other statements she made. ETHOS also advocated for leaving people in contaminated areas in Belarus and for feeding children contaminated food following the Chernobyl catastrophe.

The Reuters article also fails to mention that Tokyo Electric Power Company's compensation payments to nuclear evacuees will end after a certain number of months, once they have returned to their now radioactively contaminated communities in the former evacuation zones. This, in addition to their health concerns about chronic radioactivity exposures, is part of the reason why many nuclear evacuees refuse to go back home.

Alexaner Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus -- the country hardest hit by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe -- has used similar pressure tactics to force nuclear evacuees there to return to radioactive areas. Chernobyl evacuees were threatened with loss of their meager yet essential government compensation payments, a thin lifeline, unless they returned to their former homes and began farming the land again, despite its radioactive contamination.

Update on April 2, 2014 by

admin

In response to the news of Tamura's resettlement, Pieter Franken, the co-founder and Japan director of SAFECAST, has stated: "Though good news for the residents, what is being missed out is that the area mentioned had fairly low levels of pollution. In fact many people were evacuated to Koriyama and other cities with quite higher levels than Tamura (despite it being in the exclusion zone). So in a way, the evacuation should have been the other way around." Pieter Franken was featured on Democracy Now! in a recent broadcast interview.

Franken's irony-laden account points out the importance of using citizen-based radiation monitoring to assess radiation contamination, not reliance on government and industry for this information. Considering the uneven deposition of radioactive isotopes that occurs initially after a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima, and the subsequent cycling of radioactive isotopes in the environment which could change this measurement profile, regular measurement is prudent.