nuclear-news

Teacher: “I’m lying to a room full of students” — Fukushima City should be evacuated

 http://enenews.com/teacher-im-lying-to-a-room-full-of-students-fukushima-city-should-be-evacuated  August 24th, 2012  By ENENews  Title: Visiting the end of the world  

Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Author: Senator Scott Ludlam, Australian Greens Senator for Western Australia
Date: Aug 24, 2012

[…]

Flash forward to August 2012, with 150,000 people evacuated from places like Iitate. The mood in the region is dark. A young high school teacher downloads the unvarnished truth in a loungeroom in Fukushima City the night before our trip down to the coast.

“I’m lying to a room full of students,” he tells me, daring me to break eye contact. Like many thousands of others, his wife and children now live in temporary accommodation well outside the contaminated area, but Japan has no social security net to speak of and people can’t just walk away from jobs.

Now he is grappling with a hateful dilemma, addressing a room full of students in a city he believes is no longer safe for children. Fukushima City, population 290,000. Kōriyama City, population 336,000. Both of them hit by the plume that carried fission products from the broken reactors to the north-west before the wind swung briefly towards Tokyo. I hesitate, then ask, should this city be evacuated? He pauses a long time before answering, and finally drops his gaze. Yes.

[…]

With a slightly different fall of the dice, the Fukushima meltdowns would have cost the people of Japan their country. Another cruel accident of plate tectonics and it still could.

There is no place on this archipelago for nuclear power, and tens of millions of Japanese now understand this. Everything has changed.

August 25, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima 2012