nuclear-news

The health price paid by Fukushima clean-up workers

Fukushima: Japan’s Cut-Price Nuclear Cleanup: Human Error, Plummeting Morale and Worker Exodus 福島は割引清掃 By Global Research News Global Research, November 04, 2013 The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 43, No. 2, October 28, 2013. “……….Shigemura is most concerned about the 70 percent of Tepco workers at Fukushima Daiichi who were also forced to evacuate their homes by the meltdown. They have yet to come to terms with the loss of their homes, and many are living apart from their families in makeshift accommodation near the plant.

“They were traumatized by the tsunami and the reactor explosions, and had no idea how much they had been irradiated,” Shigemura says. “That was the acute effect, but now they are suffering from the chronic effects, such as depression, loss of motivation and issues with alcohol.”

Men such as Watanabe Kai(30), who was forced to flee his family home in March 2011, have never had psychological counseling and were immediately thrown back into the fight to save the Daiichi plant. Today, he monitors tanks full of highly toxic water for leaks. For a job with potentially serious consequences on his health, he is paid 15,000 yen a day.

Relatively little is known about the people who work at the Daiichi plant. Tepco severely rations interviews with its full-time staff. Contract workers such as Watanabe, employed by one of dozens of subcontractors, rarely talk to journalists because they fear for their jobs. Watanabe insists on a pseudonym for interviews.

Born and raised in the town of Okuma, a few miles from the plant, Watanabe’s family are nuclear refugees. His mother and father left the home he shared with them on March 12th and now live and work in Iwaki, 34 km south of the plant. He doesn’t believe they will ever return. Like Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Okuma is a nuclear ghost town.

Watanabe labored through the disaster at the Daiichi plant until he reached his annual limit for radiation exposure. He then cycled through the remaining jobs for nuclear workers in Fukushima, ending up with a decontamination crew, cleaning up the radiation that poisoned his home. The irony wasn’t lost on him but he says he bears no grudges. “We have to fix the mess we made.”…….http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-japans-cut-price-nuclear-cleanup/5356796

November 7, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, social effects