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Marshall Islanders fear return to nuclear radiation contaminated islands

RONGELAP ISLANDERS LOATH TO RETURN TO NUKED HOME PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT March 2, 2010 U.S. says radiation no longer a threat on Marshalls atollBy Giff Johnson MAJURO, Marshall Islands– Fifty-six years after an American hydrogen bomb blast in the Pacific exposed hundreds of people to radioactive fallout, the U.S. Congress is pressing Marshallese Islanders to return home by next year.But Rongelap Islanders say they fear for their health if they return home to the necklace of coral islands that was exposed to the Marshall Islands equivalent of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine.
March 1 is a national holiday that recognizes Nuclear Victims Day in the Marshall Islands. This year, which marks the 25th year since Rongelap Islanders’ self-evacuated their radioactive islands, islanders are facing a U.S. ultimatum: move back to Rongelap in 2011 or face cutoff of funding support for the “temporary” community at Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, where about 400 islanders have lived since their 1985 evacuation……….Mayor James Matayoshi said Rongelap Islanders living on Mejatto have always wanted to return to their home islands, but questions about radiation safety continue to linger —….When the 15-megaton Bravo test was detonated in 1954, no warning was given to people on Rongelap and other downwind islands. A snowstorm of radioactivity exposed unsuspecting Rongelap islanders to a near lethal dose of radiation, causing vomiting, skin burns and their hair to fall out — classic symptoms of high-level radiation exposure. In 1998, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control Radiation Studies Branch report on the Marshall Islands said that the 67 U.S. nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands spewed out 150 times more radioactive-iodine 131 than the 1986 reactive accident at Chernobyl. The majority of islanders exposed in 1954 have had thyroid tumors and cancers…..

Abon sees resettlement of Rongelap Atoll as “impossible” because only a small part of the atoll has had its nuclear contamination cleaned, while the population has grown significantly, meaning they need to use more islands to comfortably resettle.

Availability of imported food, needed to reduce intake of cesium-137 from staple crops such as coconuts, breadfruit and pandanus, is also a big worry to islanders.

RONGELAP ISLANDERS LOATH TO RETURN TO NUKED HOME – March 2, 2010

March 3, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues, OCEANIA | antinuclear, cancer, indigenous, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, radiation, radioactive