nuclear-news

The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 25, 2015:

• Murakami Tatsuya, former mayor of Tōkaimura (“Birthplace of nuclear power in Japan”): There are 14 reactors on [Japan’s Pacific coast] and I wouldn’t have been surprised if all these reactors had ended up failing in some way or another… It tells you how catastrophic it could be for a country like Japan to house nuclear power plants… It is crazy. Right now about 130,000 people in Fukushima have been evacuated from the exclusion areas, although it would be 80,000 or 90,000 people if we do not count voluntary evacuees… Speaking from the examples of Chernobyl, Fukushima should have been declared uninhabitable, especially to raise children.
• Prof. Katsuya Hirano, UCLA: I agree… families with small children should have been given new land somewhere safe to start their lives again. The government should have provided them with a new village and community to live…
• Murakami: I thought about the possibility of relocating the entire Tōkaimura myself. The news about the Fukushima crisis chilled me to the bone. As I mentioned, we were so close to having a similar situation, so I started thinking about relocating the entire village and in fact found a place in Hokkaido… and have them start dairy farming and cultivating new land in Hokkaido… I even visited the area. If it doesn’t work, I thought, other alternatives would be Australia or our sister state, Idaho.

Press Conference for Dr. Akira Sugenoya, Mayor of Matsumoto, Japan (AP: Sugenoya is a surgeon and thyroid specialist who left a prestigious Japanese hospital to perform lifesaving cancer surgeries in Chernobyl for several years): “It is clear that a significant amount of radioactive iodine was released from Fukushima Daiichi. It was a huge mistake not to take any measures immediately… There are children in Fukushima diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and the number of cases is increasing… I have said “children and pregnant women will suffer negative health effects in the future, as a result of external — and especially internal — exposure… In order to protect their lives, the government must, as a matter of national policy, move the children out of contaminated regions… The people are being exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Someone has to do something… A good part of Japan has been contaminated with nuclear fallout. This is just like the evacuation of children that took place en masse during the World War II.”

Taro Yamamoto, member of Japan’s Upper House of Parliament: “We have to grasp the real situation of which our children are in… we cannot wait around, because the conditions are getting worse. We have to move people away from the affected areas.”

Dr. Sugenoya’s press conference here | Interview with Yamamoto here