nuclear-news

For Japanese citizens and the world trust in nuclear industry is banrupt

Deadly Fukushima Crisis Further Corrodes Viability of Nuclear Energy,Tuesday, 11 March 2014   By H Patricia Hynes, Truthout | Op-Ed At the three-year anniversary of the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant reactor meltdowns, the disaster’s consequences continue to unfold. One should be a global switch from nuclear power to renewable energy sources.

The mainstream media moved on some time ago from Fukushima – and left most of us in the dark about this worsening nuclear tragedy, as if there were nothing more to mourn and no lessons to learn……..

A few thousand residents who have been allowed to return to their town Odaka find themselves alive in a dying region: “People don’t believe it is safe to visit here. They won’t believe our produce, our livestock, our fish are safe,” reported one rueful resident.

So difficult has been their fate that, by late 2013, 1,600 nuclear refugees had died of insufficient medical services, the exhaustion of relocating, suicide and, likely, heartbreak. More than 35 percent of some 38,000 Fukushima children examined have cysts or nodules on their thyroids, as compared with 1 percent of a control group of Japanese children. In a callous move to keep schools open in Fukushima, the Japanese government raised the “permissible” level of radiation for children. Japanese children now can be exposed to 20 times more radiation than was previously allowed, a level comparable to the yearly limit for German workers.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water from the site have emptied and continue to leak via groundwater into the Pacific Ocean at the rate of 400 tons per day. Radioactive cesium, a carcinogen that bioaccumulates in animal, fish and human tissue, has been found throughout mainland Japan, in fish off the coast of Fukushima (thus closing that industry) and in large migratory fish such as Bluefin tuna off the coast of California. A plume of radioactive water from Fukushima is expected to reach the West Coast of the United States in early 2014. Tragically, there is no solution in sight to trapping and treating the cesium-, tritium- and strontium-contaminated groundwater before it reaches the Pacific Ocean. “The situation at the reactor site is progressively deteriorating, not stabilizing,” stated an international group of experts in their urgent appeal for international action to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

In the wake of this $250 billion disaster, Japan closed all of its 54 nuclear power plants. An extraordinary (and embattled) act in a country that is dependent on nuclear energy for one-third of its electricity and is planning to achieve 50 percent nuclear-powered electricity by 2030. Japan had lulled its citizens into complacency with nuclear safety myths. Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time of the Fukushima meltdown, has since rejected nuclear power, saying ‘”there is no [other industrial] accident or disaster that would affect 50 million people”‘ like a nuclear accident. An unprecedented anti-nuclear citizen movement ignited in Japan after Fukushima and has persisted, with a strong majority of the population opposing nuclear power in the face of the current conservative and militaristic government’s determination to restart the offline nuclear power plants.

Radioactive waste is the nuclear industry’s nightmare, most currently so in Fukushima Dai’ichi, where intensely radioactive spent fuel rods lie in a warped and sinking structure and at risk of a catastrophic fire if another (and potentially likely) earthquake strikes the region. For this reason, the US State Department advised Americans soon after March 11 to evacuate to at least 50 miles from the plant.

TEPCO, the plant operator responsible for the cleanup of Fukushima nuclear power plants, has bankrupted the trust of Japanese citizens and the world,,,,,,,,,. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21551-deadly-fukushima-crisis-further-corrodes-viability-of-nuclear-energy

March 12, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized