nuclear-news

Japanese farmer tells how Fukushima nuclear disaster has affected the poor

Anti-Nuclear Japanese Farmer Visits South Africa, abc News, By DONNA BRYSON Associated Press JOHANNESBURG February 29, 2012  A farmer evacuated from her home near a Japanese nuclear power plant visited Soweto Wednesday to talk to impoverished South Africans about how the poor are worst hit by catastrophes like the one triggered by an earthquake in her homeland.

Anti-nuclear activists from Greenpeace, which is trying to spark a grass-roots anti-nuclear movement here, brought Ayako Oga to South Africa. The country has Africa’s only nuclear energy plant and plans to build more.

Oga said she fled her home some 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Fukushima plant on March 11, ….. Poor people who were evacuated to escape leaking radiation have found it hard to get jobs elsewhere in Japan, Oga said. She added the rich are able to afford food that is
guaranteed not to have been contaminated by radiation, and have better
access to information about how to stay safe.

In an interview before addressing about two dozen people in the auditorium of a community college, Oga said she understood that Soweto, a neighborhood to which blacks were restricted under apartheid, was largely poor and beset by lack of jobs and housing and AIDS and other health issues. She said its residents needed to add nuclear energy to their already long list of concerns, because “they will be the ones that will suffer the most when they face a
catastrophic accident.”..

.. Oga spoke of expecting that it would never be safe to return in her lifetime to her home, and of her longing to farm again. Oga said friends and neighbors have scattered. Across
Japan, she said, children are kept inside for fear playing outside will expose them to radiation, and people constantly monitor radiation levels.

“The use of atomic power always goes hand in hand with the threat of nuclear contamination,” she said, appealing to Sowetans to help “prevent this from happening again, anywhere in the world.”

Greenpeace is calling on South Africa to “abandon its nuclear expansion plans in favor of a strong push to energy efficiency and renewable power.” http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/anti-nuclear-japanese-farmer-visits-south-africa-15816486#.T1B4z4ePX_M

March 2, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general