“The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is a Serious Crime”: Interview with Professor Koide
Introduction
Koide Hiroaki (66) has emerged as an influential voice and a central figure in the anti-nuclear movement since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi of March 11, 2011. He spent his entire career as a nuclear engineer working towards the abolition of nuclear power plants. His powerful critique of the “nuclear village” and active involvement in anti-nuclear movements “earned him an honorable form of purgatory as a permanent assistant professor at Kyoto University.”1 Koide retired from Kyoto University in the spring of 2015, but continues to write and act as an important voice of conscience for many who share his vision of the future free from nuclear energy and weapons. He has authored 20 books on the subject. Professor Kasai Hirotaka and I visited his office at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute in Kumatori, Osaka, on December 26th, 2014 for this interview. We believe that the contents of the interview, which offer new information about the degree of radioactive contamination and invaluable insight into Koide’s ethical and political stance as a scientist, remain crucial for our critical reflection on ecological destruction, the violation of human rights, and individual responsibility. Professor Robert Stolz, the translator of this interview and the author of Bad Water (Duke University Press, 2015), provides a historical perspective on the interview in a separate article. KH
Interview
I The Fukushima Disaster and Government and Corporate Response
Hirano: How does the Fukushima accident compare with the bombing of Hiroshima or Chernobyl in its scale? What are the possible effects of this yet unknown exposure?
Koide: Let’s start with the scale of the accident: It was a core meltdown involving the release of various kinds of radioactive material. Radioactive noble gas isotopes were also released, as were iodine, cesium, strontium, and other radioactive material. The noble gas isotopes have a short half-life and so at this stage they are all gone. Iodine, too, is gone. So now four years since the accident the materials that are still a problem are cesium-137, strontium-90, and tritium; really, it’s these three.2
Now, as for the scale of the accident, I think it would be best to compare these three radionuclides. Today the main contamination of Japanese soil is the radionuclide cesium-137 [Cs-137 or 137Cs]. The ocean is largely contaminated with strontium-90 [Sr-90 or 90Sr] and tritium [T or 3H]. Right now the main culprit adding to the exposure of the people in Japan is Cs-137, so I think it’s best to use Cs-137 as a standard for measuring the scale of the accident.
But we simply don’t know with any precision how much Cs-137 was released. That’s because all the measuring equipment was destroyed at the time of the accident. How much Cs-137 was released into the air? How much was spilled in the sea? We just don’t know.
Still, the Japanese government has reported estimates to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. According to those estimated levels, reactors 1, 2, and 3 had been in operation on March 11, 2011, and all three suffered meltdowns. Those three reactors released 1.5×1016 Becquerels of Cs-137, which would make it a release of 168 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bombing. And this is only material released into the atmosphere-at least according to Japanese government estimates.
But I myself think the government’s numbers are an underestimate. Various experts and institutes from around the world have offered several of their own estimates. There are those that are lower than the Japanese government’s numbers and those that are higher, some two or three times higher than the government’s numbers. According to these other estimates I think that the release of Cs-137 into the atmosphere could be around 500 times the Hiroshima bombing.
Now for what has been washed into the sea. That number is likely not much different from the levels released into the atmosphere. Even today we are unable to prevent this release. And so if we combine the amount of Cs-137 released in the air and the ocean together, we get an estimate several hundred times the Hiroshima levels. And some estimates suggest the Fukushima accident could be as much as one-thousand Hiroshimas.
Now to compare this with other accidents: The amount released into the atmosphere from the explosion during the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was 800 to 1000 times the Hiroshima levels. Put simply, these estimates place Fukushima on par with Chernobyl.
Worse than any of these, however, is atmospheric testing. From the 1950s to the 1960s atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons had already released Cs-137 into the air more than sixty times the numbers released even by the Japanese government for Fukushima. Of course Fukushima is an incredible tragedy, but considered from the earth as a whole it is a rather small accident.
Hirano: I want to ask in more detail about the effect of Cs-137 on the human body and the environment.
Koide: Cesium is an alkaline metal. From the human body’s perspective, cesium closely resembles potassium. The body contains enormous amounts of potassium. It is essential for humans. It’s everywhere in our bodies. Especially our flesh and muscles are full of potassium. And because of this, when cesium is released into the environment, the body deals with cesium as it does with the alkaline metal potassium, which is to say that it is taken into the body and accumulates there.
Strontium is an earth metal. The body treats it like calcium. As you know calcium is a human body building block that accumulates in our bones. Strontium, too, is taken into and collects in the bones. Just as cesium is taken in and is transported to the flesh and muscle.
Hirano: Comparing the releases from nuclear tests by the US and the USSR during the Cold War period, you said that the Fukushima accident was small. So in what way should we think about Fukushima: is it best to consider it a Japanese problem, or to consider it from a global perspective?
Koide: The amount of products of nuclear fission released during atmospheric testing was enormous, and these particles continue to expose humans to radiation. I’m a bit older than you and I recall in my childhood being told not to let the rain fall on me at the time of the testing. In this way everyone on earth has been exposed (hibaku/ 被曝). And because of this testing, historically speaking, cancer rates have slowly risen; I believe this increase in cancer is due to the exposure suffered during the atmospheric testing. Now the radioactive material released from Fukushima has been dispersed across the globe and so once again everyone on earth has been exposed to additional radiation. I think we can expect cancer rates to rise once again.
Atmospheric nuclear testing released all of the radioactive material in the explosions, which entered the stratosphere. Between the stratosphere and the troposphere there is the tropopause, and every year come spring all that material dispersed in the stratosphere breaks through the tropopause and falls to earth. So that material, though initially dispersed in the stratosphere, eventually falls to earth evenly, everywhere. Actually, it might not be accurate to say that it falls evenly on the earth. The majority of the testing was done in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, such as Nevada and the Semipalatinsk test site [in Kazakhstan], so that the northern hemisphere-as the site of most of the testing-is heavily contaminated, and within that the temperate region is heavily contaminated. Still, I can say the atmospheric testing overall has caused global contamination.
My focus now is to figure out how to deal with the acute and heavy contamination from Fukushima. I know something needs to be done right there in that specific place. That contamination will disperse and be diffused across the globe. Once dispersed, the amount of radioactive material from Fukushima will be small when compared with the atmospheric testing. Which is not to say it is not harmful. An increase in cancer will be the result. I mention that for humanity as a whole; the atmospheric tests were worse.
Now, strontium-90 [Sr-90] has been leaking from Fukushima into the ocean, so it will eventually reach the United States, especially the west coast. This much we are sure of. But to answer your question, the amount of dispersed cesium and strontium released by the atmospheric tests is tens of times greater than the Fukushima levels. Because the west coast of the US is already contaminated from the atmospheric testing, though the dispersed contamination from Fukushima will reach US shores, for people living on the US west coast, the Fukushima accident―and this is perhaps awful to say―contamination from Fukushima is hardly worth considering. Historically a much greater event has already taken place.
Hirano: To put that another way, the current Fukushima accident gives us a chance to reconsider the enormity of the past contamination from US and Soviet atmospheric tests, which has not been openly discussed.
Koide: Yes, that’s exactly right. In fact, it is the masses of people who need to realize the impact of the contamination on them. In the case of the Fukushima disaster, for example, they need to be aware that some radioactive material is reaching the North American coast, and the prevailing westerly winds will carry anything released into the atmosphere to the US. Those earlier numbers from the Japanese government indicate that the levels for Cs-137 in the atmosphere are 168 times those of the Hiroshima bombing. I’ve been told that level is 1.5 x 1016 Becquerels [Bq]. These exponents can be a pain to process, so if we think of it in peta-units-which is 1015-we get essentially 15 petabecquerels [PBq].
That said, while we are not really sure this is the number, we do know that a portion of this material will ride the prevailing winds across the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, closer to the ground, the winds will be east, south, and north, and therefore this other portion will fall on Japan―and we can investigate the actual levels here: how much fell on this town, on this prefecture? Adding these up, it seems to be only 2.4 PBq. Which is to say of the total fifteen PBq, 2.4, or roughly only 16%, fell on Japanese soil. If the totals are higher, still a smaller share of the total contamination will have fallen on Japan compared with the Pacific, with the largest portion falling on the west coast of the United States.
So why don’t we hear complaints from the US? Why are there no calls for compensation? Whenever someone asks me this, I simply say that there just aren’t any such complaints. Why is this so? Well the levels released by the US during the atmospheric testing were tens of times greater than Fukushima. They are the criminals, so they cannot ask for compensation from Japan. The U.S. government does not want to have to reflect on its own past, and I think they are eager to completely avoid bringing up anything like that conversation. That is why I believe it is so important that those who have been exposed to radioactive contamination realize what atmospheric testing has done to them.
Kasai: I’d like to get back to the moment of the accident in some detail. On March 11, 2011 we had the East Japan Disaster (meaning the earthquake and tsunami off Tohoku). You’ve already talked about the string of accidents at the nuclear plant. At the moment the accident was taking place, you were following the response by the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in real time. What did you see in those initial moments?
Koide: It was truly a disastrous response. On the 11th I was in the laboratory in Kyoto as March was my month to work in the radiation-controlled area.3 It was normal workday hours and various tasks kept me busy working within the controlled area. Of course there is no TV or anything like that in the work space. That night there was a meeting so I came out to attend and that’s when I saw the images of the Sendai airport being swept away by the tsunami. The report said that there had been a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Then I wondered about the safety of the nuclear plants.
Right then, there really was no more information. We had scheduled a nuclear safety issues seminar for the 18th. I’ve participated in hundreds of these seminars. Participants from the Ukraine had just arrived on the 11th. We promised to go out drinking after they arrived and so that night I went out. There was no more TV, and while there was a vague unease among us, that’s how we spent the time.
The next day I learned that all power at Fukushima had been lost and I knew things were not going to be simple. Then at noon on the 12th the roof of reactor one was blown off; at that point any expert must have known there had been a reactor meltdown. So I was certain of a core meltdown and because once it has gone this far, there is no going back, it was time to call for anyone who could evacuate to do so. I thought we were at that stage on the 12th.
Yet neither the government nor TEPCO said a single word about a core meltdown; they announced that the incident merited a 3 or 4 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. I remember thinking “You’ve got to be kidding! There’s already been a meltdown. This is at least a level 6 or 7.” But neither the government nor TEPCO gave any indication of this and there was no word of it in the media either.
One by one there were explosions at reactors 3, 4, and 2. As an expert in nuclear power, I understood there was absolutely nothing that could be done. I thought people needed to be evacuating, but still the Japanese government didn’t make the call. Government officials had set up at an off-site center near a power plant in Fukushima―at first they announced evacuation inside two kilometers, then that expanded to three, five, ten, and finally twenty km. After that nothing was done. The offsite center was supposed to coordinate the emergency response in the event of an accident, but it turned out that every one of the officials fled. They left the employees behind and fled. The Japanese government’s response was indescribably cruel.
Kasai: It seems the very words “meltdown” (メルトダウン) and “core meltdown” (roshin yōyū/炉心熔融) were strictly forbidden.
Koide: Exactly.
Kasai: I was in Japan watching on TV. What shocked me was all the nuclear power experts explaining the incident in the studio. I suppose it was a satellite relay, but when reactor number three exploded on our screens they were giving their analyses of the explosion in real time. There were experts on TV saying that the reactor had a blast valve that was used successfully. Even hearing that, an average viewer might think something was amiss. But having physicists, experts on radiation, on TV saying these things, well, even the average viewer wouldn’t buy that explanation. In a broad sense, nuclear experts like yourself played several roles in the media and government.
Koide: Yes, that’s clearly true for pronuclear experts. They all tended to tell a story that underestimated the accident. Immediately after the accident public announcements and information were restricted. As a result individual opinions or statements were strictly forbidden and nearly all experts remained silent, so even basic information was not broadcast. Though I’d made statements from the nuclear lab beginning on the 12th, it is likely there were instructions from the Ministry of Science and Education to silence me. The head of the lab convened several meetings where he told each of us not to make any statement, that the lab would toe the official line when dealing with the mass media. I thought this was wrong and said that anyone who was asked a question by the media should answer it, further saying that if I were asked a question, I had a responsibility to answer. Since then I’ve continued to make statements in the media. Still the large majority of nuclear researchers were not able to do this.
As a result it was the pronuclear researchers who monopolized the interpretations – exactly. So as they went to the TV studios I think each was told: “Today, it’s your turn to go to the studio.” I think that’s how they played their part and handled the media.
Kasai: With respect to controlling information, would you say your experience with the head of the nuclear lab shows how the professional organizations exert pressure on the universities?
Koide: Yes, I would. The head of the lab opened a conference with all the other laboratories―even I went. There he said that any statements to the media should be on message and come only from the information office.
Kasai: So pressure came from academic conferences.
Koide: Yes, there was pressure coming from the academic conference side as well. Take for example something like a conference on nuclear power. From the very start it was never a real discussion; it was a meeting of powerful and vocal spokesmen for the nuclear community or village (genshiryoku kyōdōtai/原子力共同体 or genshiryoku mura/ 原子力村), which is to say the group of pronuclear government officials and private companies mainly centered around the LDP and Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and other pronuclear manufacturers of power plants―and of course their supporters in the media. Thus as an organization the conference was predisposed to underestimate the accident and to then promote that underestimation.
Hirano: Immediately after the accident you testified in the Diet presenting data indicating the seriousness of the disaster and demanding that the government terminate the operation of all the power plants.4
Koide: I did.
Hirano: After that it seems you weren’t again asked to speak publicly, or given the opportunity to offer more detailed thoughts on the situation.
Koide: By “speak publicly” you mean in the Diet or in some other official government setting?
Hirano: Yes, and also in the media.
Koide: With respect to the media, I’ve never really had any confidence in them. Since the accident, I’ve been overwhelmingly busy and haven’t accepted a single invitation from TV stations.
Hirano: I see. So there were invitations.
Koide: There have been many calls saying, “come down to the studio.” But I always tell them that I am too busy for this sort of thing. I’d say, if you come to my office, we could meet. Many did come by, even back then. But as everyone knows, in television you might talk for an hour and none of it makes it on air, or if it does, it’s maybe thirty seconds.
Hirano: Right, and only the convenient parts.
Koide: That’s it and there’s really nothing that can be done about it. There was, however, one outlet for which I was extremely grateful: the daily radio program called Tanemaki Journal (種まきジャーナル).5 There I could go on every day and offer my thoughts live. I wish it could have continued, but it was completely and totally smashed. What a world we live.
Kasai: So, on the subject of standards used for assessing the danger posed by radiation for the human body and the environment: What are your thoughts on how the government deals with this issue?
Koide: They are absolutely not dealing with it at all. I think you already know this but in Japan the average person is not supposed to be exposed to more than one milliSievert per year―that’s set by law. Why is that the level decided on? Because exposure to radiation is dangerous. If exposure weren’t dangerous, if low levels of exposure were safe, there’d be no problem even without that legal limit. But exposure to radiation is dangerous―this is the conclusion of all research. So every nation in the world has set legal limits for exposure.
For people like me who get paid to work with radiation, it’s not really possible to observe the 1mSv/yr limit [1mSv/yr]. We’re told that in exchange for our salaries, we accept exposure to twenty milliSieverts a year. That’s the standard I work under in my job. But the current Japanese government has now stated that if contamination is under 20mSv/yr somewhere, that place is safe to return to―safe to return to even for children. This is way beyond common sense.
Hirano: What is the basis of this claim? Why would the government announce these numbers and forcefully declare these areas safe to return to? What’s the basis for the government’s numbers?
Koide: The basis for those numbers…for example the government says that organizations like the IAEA or the ICRP [International Commission on Radiological Protection] suggest that in emergencies during which the 1mSv/yr standard cannot be maintained standards should be set between twenty and 100mSv/yr. The government seizes on this and declares that since the IAEA and the ICRP have said this, that 20mSv/yr is therefore a safe level-usually adding that membership in both the IAEA and the ICRP is voluntary anyway. But because these organizations have said this is no reason to break Japanese law. If Japan is a nation governed by the rule of law at all, surely this means that the very people who make the laws should also follow them―that should be obvious. But these guys have declared 20mSv/yr safe even for children. There is absolutely no way I can consent to this.
Hirano: So there is no scientific basis for these levels.
Koide: Well… the danger corresponds to the amount of exposure―you probably know this―so for a country that has declared its intention to maintain the 1mSv/yr standard to then turn around and ask people to endure twenty times that level, there is no scientific basis for that declaration. That’s a social decision.
But if you want to inquire as to why, as I’ve mentioned to you, some 2.4 petaBecquerels of radioactive material have fallen on Japan, that material has been dispersed, contaminating Tohoku, Kanto, and western Japan. So in addition to the law setting the legal limit for exposure at 1mSv/yr, there is another law that states that absolutely nothing may be removed from a radioactive management area in which the levels exceed 40,000 Becquerels per square meter.
So the question becomes how many places or how much area has been contaminated beyond 40,000 Bq/m2? And according to the investigations, that answer is 140,000 km2. The entirety of Fukushima prefecture has been contaminated to where all of it must be declared a radioactivity management area. Indeed, while centered on Fukushima, parts of Chiba and Tokyo have also been contaminated. The number of people living in what must be called a radiation-controlled area is in the millions, and could exceed ten million.
For me, if Japan is in fact a nation governed by the rule of law, I believe the government has the responsibility to evacuate these entire communities. Instead of taking a proper action to secure people’s livelihood, the government decided to leave them exposed to the real danger of radiation. In my view, Fukushima should be declared inhabitable and the government and TEPCO should bear a legal responsibility for the people displaced and dispossessed by the nuclear disaster. That’s what I think, but if that were to be done, it would likely bankrupt the country. I think that even though it could bankrupt Japan, the government should have carried out the evacuation to set an example of what the government is supposed to do. But obviously those in and around the LDP certainly didn’t agree. They’ve decided to sacrifice people and get by taking on as little burden as possible. So they’ve made the social decision to force people to endure their exposure. In my view, this is a serious crime committed by Japan’s ruling elite.
I would like people to know just how many thousands of people live in this abnormal situation where even nuclear scientists like me are not allowed to enter, not to mention, drink the water. It is strange that this issue has been left out of all debate over the effects of the radioactive exposure. We must be aware that contemporary Japan continues to operate outside the law in abandoning these people to their fate by saying it’s an extraordinary situation. Under such circumstances, I think, there are a multitude of symptoms of illnesses in contaminated areas. But if we’re talking about any given symptom, it’s hard to say since we just don’t have any good epidemiological studies, or even any good data. But there will surely be symptoms, namely cancer and leukemia.
However little exposure to radiation is, it causes cancer and leukemia―this is the conclusion of all current science. These symptoms are said to become visible 5 years after the initial exposure. But because radiation is not the sole cause of cancer or leukemia establishing a direct causal relationship is extremely difficult. For this very reason we need to continue to investigate the state of exposure by conducting rigorous epidemiological studies. But this government wishes instead to hide the damage so I’m afraid no such study is on the horizon. In addition, I have heard about many cases of nose bleeding, severe headaches, and extreme exhaustion. And I am truly concerned about small children and young people living in Fukushima as they are most vulnerable to exposure.
Hirano: So what is your view of the actual damages of radiation exposure on human health?
Koide: On the evening of the Fukushima dai-ichi reactor accident of March 11, 2011, a Radiation Emergency Declaration was announced. The Declaration suspended existing Japanese law concerning exposure to radiation. Though Japanese law sets the limit for exposure for the general population at one milliSievert a year [1mSv/yr], the new permissible level would be 20 mSv/yr. That Emergency Declaration is still in effect. It is common knowledge that even low levels of exposure are dangerous. Including even infants in this newly imposed 20mSv/yr standard will obviously lead to various diseases. Further, because the monitoring equipment was destroyed at the time of the accident we do not have accurate data on the exposure levels of the residents. Numerous cases of thyroid cancer have been found. The prevalence of thyroid cancer is dozens of times that of normal incidence. Pro-nuclear groups say those numbers are the result of the screening process itself, not the effect of radiation exposure. Which is to say that this was the first major screening of that population and so it was natural that many cases of thyroid cancer would be found. Put differently, what they are saying is that they have never conducted a thorough study of radiation exposure and its impact on human health. Science should acknowledge what it already knows and what it does not. If it is true that there is no established scientific data, a properly scientific approach would be to carry out a through investigation. To deny the damage to health by exposure to radiation without such an investigation is absolutely at odds with the scientific spirit. Prof. Tsuda at Okayama University has already conducted a detailed study on the outbreak of thyroid cancer, showing an epidemiological-like outbreak. Just as happened at Chernobyl, as time passes it is clear there will be more and more instances of all kinds of illnesses.
Hirano: In your books you’ve often stated that there is no uncontaminated food. But for most Japanese, such basic knowledge seems limited to food from Fukushima, and nearby parts of Ibaraki, Gumma, Chiba, Miyagi. For food produced outside these areas, do you think it’s necessary to have strict testing of food that is sold and consumed? What is to be done? Do you think food from outside these areas should also be subject to strict testing before being sent to market and consumed?
Koide: Right, as we discussed earlier, before the Fukushima accident the entire globe was already contaminated with radiation. This means that Tohoku or Kanto or Kansai food, all of it, has been contaminated with radiation―radiation from atmospheric tests. Beyond this, contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl accident reached Japan on the prevailing westerly winds, meaning that all Japanese food was contaminated. And on top of all this, with the Fukushima disaster, as I mentioned, it is not that a thick layer of contamination has dispersed to every corner of the globe from Fukushima, but that this thick layer of contamination is right now centered on Fukushima.
So if we were to carefully measure the levels of food contamination, we’d more or less find moving out from the highest levels in Fukushima to say western Japan or Kyushu, that the numbers would gradually decline to the lower levels received from the atmospheric tests. Right now the people of Fukushima have been abandoned in the areas of the highest levels of radiation. And abandoned people have to find a way to live. Farmers produce agricultural goods, dairy farmers produce dairy products, and ranchers produce meat; these people must do so in order to live. They are not the ones to be blamed at all.
As the Japanese state is absolutely unreliable in this matter, these people have no choice but to go on producing food in that place, all the while suffering further exposure. So I don’t think we can throw out the food they produce there under those conditions. Inevitably someone has to consume that food―I suggest it be fed to the pronuclear lobby (laughs). We should serve all of the most heavily contaminated food at say the employee cafeteria at TEPCO or in the cafeteria for Diet members in the Diet building. But that isn’t nearly enough. We must carefully inspect the food, and once we’ve determined what foods have what levels of contamination, once that is fully measured and delineated, then those who have the corresponding levels of responsibility should eat it, should be given it.
Now of course strict levels of responsibility cannot really be allotted one by one to individuals that way, so when it comes to this food, I would propose devising a “60 and over” system. The most contaminated foods could only be eaten by those 60 years old and older, and from there also have food for “50 and over,” “40 and over,” “30 and over” – giving the best food to children. For example, school lunches would get the most uncontaminated food available―there’d still be contamination from the atmospheric tests―but food with only those levels would be given to children and only adults would receive the contaminated food. That would be my proposal.
My proposal would first be a precise measurement, starting from Fukushima and then of course including western Japan and Kyushu, to sort out the levels and then determine the relative burdens. I am aware that this is a controversial proposal, but each one of us, especially those who built postwar Japan, bears responsibility for allowing our society to heavily dependent on nuclear energy without carefully reflecting on the risks and consequences of it. And more importantly, we have the responsibility for protecting children.
Kasai: Recently, that idea has been suggested in Nishio Masamichi’s Radioactive Archipelago (Hibaku retto/『被爆列島』). You’ve just stressed that though the first step must be a rigorous measurement, right now that is simply impossible.
Koide: Right, completely impossible.
Kasai: So, that’s true of water as well. First I don’t think most people know how to measure the levels in water. You’ve already said how the current minimum standards are worthless, that below a certain threshold it would be displayed as “ND” (Not Detectable). For example, for tap water, up to 20 Becquerels would be posted as “ND,” exactly as if there was no radiation detected at all. Yet even with all these doubts on measurement, we must start with it, though it’s a dizzyingly long road ahead. But what do you think can be done to change this situation for the better?
Koide: Right now Japan has a standard of 100Bq/kg for general foodstuffs. Before the Fukushima disaster, Japanese foodstuffs were contaminated―by the atmospheric tests―at a level of 0.1Bq/kg. Of course there were some foods with less contamination and some with more. Still, roughly speaking it was 0.1Bq/kg. So when you’re talking 100 Bq/kg that’s allowing 1,000 times the [pre-Fukushima] levels.
As I said before, any exposure is absolutely dangerous. And the dangers increase corresponding to an increase in levels of exposure; this is the conclusion of all research. 100 Bq/kg is dangerous, 99 is dangerous, as is 90, and 50, and 10―they are all dangerous. 10 Bq/kg is 100 times the pre-Fukushima levels.
So I think it’s necessary to precisely measure the levels of contamination. As many people are living in a state of anxiety, groups like consumers’ cooperatives and other sorts of organizations are trying to measure the contamination on their own. But the measuring devices that these groups are able to get, such as the ones called NAI, these devices can only measure levels above 20Bq/kg. While this means that they can measure levels as little as one-fifth of the national thresholds, from my perspective even this lower level is far too high.
And the worst thing that could happen is thinking that any contamination below the detectable limits of these machines, meaning below 20Bq/kg, would be misunderstood as being free of contamination, and then having the Fukushima prefectural government actively using this data as good news: “measurements below the detectable limits of the device must be clean; we can even serve this food in school cafeterias,” or PR campaigns announcing “Fukushima produce is safe.” Of course it would be totally outrageous and unthinkable and yes I think every effort should be made to serve the least contaminated food in school cafeterias―but the reality is that any food tested below detectable levels is distributed to schools as safe produce.
I think we need to stop this situation, and technically speaking, I think several germanium semiconductor detectors must be deployed instead. But a germanium detector would cost from $100,000 to $200,000. And in order to use it, the detector needs to be kept at 150 degree below zero Celsius. So these are not devices that the average citizen is going to be able to use.
So no matter how dedicated any individual citizen may be, there are real limitations when it comes to measuring radiation levels. If you ask me what should be done, for example when faced with Cs-137 or Sr-90, what should be done about these contaminants? Well these contaminants were produced in a nuclear reactor at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and it means that they are unmistakably TEPCO’s property. And if their private property is found to have contaminated other areas they have undeniable responsibility for it. So I think this is something that is required of TEPCO. I think it is TEPCO’s responsibility to precisely measure which foods have been contaminated, and to what extent, and then to report the results to the public. I think this is something the public should demand. After TEPCO the government also has responsibility―they gave their seal of approval to TEPCO after all. So the public should also demand that the government precisely measure the levels and publish the results.
Because there are limits to what one can do on one’s own, I think we need a movement that forces the government and TEPCO to take responsibility for the precise measurement of the contamination.
Hirano: Some have raised doubts over precisely this kind of rigorous measurement citing possible damage caused by rumors or misinformation (fūhyōhigai/風評被害), but to me this sort of criticism is tainted with a sort of “national morality” discourse (kokumin dōtokuron/国民道徳論).
Koide: Yes, I think so.
Hirano: There seems to be a very strong sense of dividing people into those who are seen as patriotic and those who are seen as un-Japanese (hikokumin/非国民).
Koide: For me, I’ve been making statements on the Fukushima contamination. These statements have been denounced and even made some angry with me. But the contamination is real. For a long time now I’ve been the kind of person who would rather hear the truth, no matter how awful, than to remain ignorant. I am absolutely not going to hide the truth; no matter how much criticism I have to take I am going to diligently report the truth. Yeah, a lot of people get angry with me. (Laughs).
Kasai: On this point, this year saw the publishing of Kariya Tetsu’s manga series Oi shinbo: Fukushima no shinjitsu (『美味しんぼ – 福島の真実』). 6 It would seem a kind of political campaign was developed to attack it. What is your take on this?
Koide: The editors sent me a copy and I’ve read it. It’s an awesome manga. In this day and age we just don’t have this kind of detailed manga on this problem and I am grateful for it. And more, Oi shinbo talks about the nosebleeds [caused by radiation]. The nosebleeds are real. Lots of Fukushima residents are said to be suffering from nosebleeds. Itokawa, the mayor of Futaba machi, has shown us proof. One of my acquaintances often talks about the nosebleeds.
It was true at Chernobyl, too. But nosebleeds have not been definitively and scientifically linked to exposure to radiation.7 Still there is no denying that it is real and happening. So even if current science is unable to explain it, it’s for science to ask just what is going on? Science has a duty to explain this, to tell the truth without obfuscation. No matter the reasons, we should be allowed to tell the truth. So for me I don’t think there is anything wrong with this part of Oi shinbo.
Kasai: I think Oi shinbo clearly exposed the politically constructed narratives “damage from rumor or misinformation” and “emotional bonds” (kizuna/絆) as fictions, and so for this reason it appears it had to be crushed.
Koide: Exactly. But Kariya, the author of Oi shinbo, is not one of the criminals responsible for the Fukushima disaster. Rather the government officials who caused the Fukushima disaster are the criminals. Yet it is these same government bureaucrats who now come out and complain that this manga is out of order. I say, “No, it’s you who are out of order. We need to send you to prison right now.”
But isn’t it always the case that a criminal who has committed a crime remains unquestioned and so starts bashing those who are telling the truth? When that happens I think the problem is precisely this word you just used “emotional bonds.” Since Fukushima, I have come to hate this word. (Laughs).
Hirano: “Bonds” seems to be the new nationalism, doesn’t it?
Koide: Yes, yes it does.
Hirano: You’ve often said that the Japanese economy and the people’s lifestyle would be fine even without a single nuclear power plant. In fact, since the government shut all the nuclear reactors down, the people have experienced no real trouble at all. In addition, considered in light of world standards we still have material riches and a lifestyle of surplus. Given this, what are your thoughts on the call to restart the reactors? For what purpose, what reason do you think the government has?8
Koide: First of all, the power companies don’t want to go bankrupt. In other words, the heads of the power companies do not want to take personal responsibility. For example, if the reactors are restarted and there’s an accident, are the heads of the power companies going to be punished? We already know that they will not be. Even after the Fukushima disaster neither the chairman, nor the CEO, nor anyone below―not a single person―was punished.9 It certainly looks as if the reactors are restarted and there’s an accident, the heads of the power companies would not be required to take any responsibility. The heads of the power companies, from Kyushu Electric to Kansai Electric, have received this message loud and clear.
What’s more, if the nuclear power plants are idled and not allowed to restart, then all the capital they represent becomes a non-performing asset. And of course this is anathema to anyone in management.
Hirano: If we could return to a technical discussion specifically how to decommission a reactor. As have others in your field you’ve already stated that a full end game cannot be envisioned yet. Still could you talk about what makes this issue so difficult?
Koide: By decommissioning you mean the endpoint of the Fukushima reactors?
Hirano: Yes, what does it mean for Fukushima dai-ichi?
Koide: When we say decommission we basically mean: How do we fully contain the radiation? At least I think that’s the main point. Now this is impossible if we don’t know the status of the melted core. Though it’s been four years since the disaster we simply do not know where the core is or in what state it is.
This is a situation that only happens in nuclear accidents. However large a chemical plant explosion may be there’d probably be an initial fire, but usually after several days, perhaps weeks you’d still be able to go on site and investigate. You’d be able to see just how things broke down. And in some situations might even be able to fix them. But with an accident at a nuclear plant you cannot even go on site four years later―probably not even ten years later.
Hirano: Because the contamination is so severe that no one can come close to it.
Koide: Yes. For humans going there means instant death, so the only way at all is to use robots. But robots are extremely vulnerable to radiation. Consider, robots receive their instructions through series of 1s and 0s, so should the radiation switch a 0 to a 1 you’d end up with completely different instructions. Essentially robots are useless. Even if you are able to send them in they can never return. Because this has been the case up to now, the only way left in the end might be to use robots that try to avoid exposure or that are built as much as possible to withstand exposure, but that is no simple thing.
So it means until we figure out what to do it would still take many years. Once you understand this fact you can start thinking about what can be done. And at the very least the “road map” devised by the government and TEPCO is the most absolutely optimistic road map that there could be. They are convinced that the melted core fell through the bottom of the pressure vessel and now lie at the bottom of the containment vessel―basically piling up like nuggets of the melted core. There’s no way this would be the case. (Laughs).
As the severity of the disaster became clear, water was repeatedly thrown on the reactors. This water would evaporate and dissipate continuously. That was the actual situation. There is no way that the melted core would have stayed as slimy liquid and then piled up like so many little nuggets. It should have been scattered all over the place. This is how the government and TEPCO’s roadmap goes: The buns would stay at the bottom of the containment vessel, above which is the reactor pressure vessel―a steel pressure furnace. With the furnace floor broken open, there is a hollow at the bottom through which the melted core must have leaked.
So at some point both the containment vessel and the pressure vessel would be filled with water and they’ll be able to see the nuggets of melted core by looking from above down into the water. They say the nuggets (the fallen material), yes, that they sit some thirty to forty meters below the water’s surface, that they’ll eventually be able to grab and remove them. This is all it takes, according to the government and TEPCO’s roadmap. Not a chance. This simply cannot be done.
Hirano: Obviously we can’t confirm or really say anything definitive about the situation in the reactors, but what do you think has happened?
Koide: I simply don’t know. But as I have mentioned, this whole “nugget” scenario is just not the case, and so I think the materials are scattered all over the place. Though the containment vessel is made of steel, if the melted core has come in contact with that steel, just as it ate through the floor of the pressure vessel, it could possibly have melted through the containment vessel. Depending on how things developed this, too, is a possibility. Unfortunately, I simply do not know.
Hirano: If that is in fact the situation, what steps are necessary?
Koide: First, as we talked about earlier, radiation must be prevented from being released into the environment. As I consider this task as “decommissioning” or the final containment of the accident, I think in order to prevent the release into the environment you must do whatever you can starting from the worst-case scenario.
There are situations in which the containment vessel can suffer a melt-through. I think this likely has already happened. And if it has happened what should be done? Outside the reactor there flows ground water. If the melted core were to come in contact with the ground water, the whole situation would be unmanageable. While this may have already have happened, in order to get any kind of control over the situation, some sort of barrier must be built to prevent the melted core from reaching the ground water. I’ve been saying this since May 2011―and they have not done a thing.
Kasai: This barrier would be an ice dam, a wall of super-chilled soil.
Koide: That’s the most recent idea. But it simply cannot be done successfully. It would cost billions of dollars. And it would fail. And when it did fail they’d say there’s nothing to be done but build a concrete wall. No matter how foolish an idea may be, they’ll just keep moving from failure to failure.
But really, for the construction companies that’s a good thing. I think Kashima would be the ones to build the super-chilled earth wall, for some billions of dollars. And if it doesn’t work―they wouldn’t have to take responsibility. Next they’d build an impermeable concrete wall. Several huge construction firms (zenekon/ゼネコン) would be contracted and would all make billions.
But considered from the perspective of actually ending the disaster, it would be a series of failures. Personally, I think an underground, impermeable wall needs to be built immediately. They are not going to be able to remove the material. All that can be done is to contain it. Underground the wall needs to be strengthened; above ground the only choice is some sort of sarcophagus like the one they built over Chernobyl. But even this would take dozens of years―I’ll probably be dead by then.
Kasai: There are temporary tanks sitting on land for this water, but they are starting to leak. What should be done about this contaminated water? There’s not enough space for all of it on land; it cannot be controlled; and every year the volume grows larger.
Koide: The radioactive water has penetrated the coastline around the Fukushima Daiichi. Underground water in the large area of Fukushima has been seriously contaminated. And at some point those contaminated water tanks will fail. I thought we must do everything that we possibly could. Already in March of 2011 there was some 100,000 tons of contaminated water. Even then I proposed moving it but didn’t get anywhere with it. Now there’s up-to 400,000 tons. In the near―meaning not too distant―future there will be nothing left but to release it into the sea.10 The water contains plutonium 239 and its release into the Ocean has both local and global impacts. A microgram of plutonium can cause death if inhaled.
Kasai: It appears that they are already moving toward that direction a little at a time aren’t they.
Koide: The Nuclear Regulatory Committee has been hinting at the possibility of releasing it into the ocean.
Kasai: They have been trying to persuade the fishing cooperatives and others to allow the release.
Koide: Yes, they have.
Kasai: Something that has not been much of a topic of discussion today is decontamination. It has become a rather large industry, in other words, “the exposure industry” (hibaku sangyō/被曝産業). Do you think decontamination is really meaningful and effective?
Koide: Yes, I do. And we must do it. But, to say that because we’ve decontaminated some area that the whole issue is resolved, or that people may safely live in a decontaminated place―I think that is a real problem.
First, fundamentally, people must not be forced to live in contaminated areas that must be decontaminated. First must come complete evacuation. The state must take on the responsibility to allow whole communities to evacuate. Of course, they did not do this.
Briefly, I use the word “decontamination” (josen/除染), which is a compound word written with the characters for “remove” and “stain.” But this is something that cannot be completed when it comes to radiation, so the original sense of the word “removal of contaminants” is impossible. But as long as people are abandoned in the contaminated areas, I believe all possible actions should be taken to lessen their exposure. It is essential that the contamination be removed as far away as possible, to be transported far from where people live. For this reason I prefer to call it “[toxic] relocation” (isen/移染).
But even if this is done, that does not mean that the radiation has been erased. This stuff contaminates everything from mountains to what have you, it gets into the space of people’s lives. When that happens it must be removed. But removal merely means moving it around―it does not mean eliminating it. It means another job is waiting to handle the contaminated materials that get moved around.
Right now the authorities say they want various prefectures and other local governments to build a temporary storage and bury the accumulated contamination there.
We talked about this before, but the contaminants themselves were clearly formerly in the reactor at TEPCO’s Fukshima Daiichi plant and are therefore also clearly TEPCO’s property. So while it is residents who are doing the hard work of collecting all these contaminants, I think it would be right and just for these contaminants to be returned to TEPCO. Earlier prof. Kasai told us the contaminants were being called “no-one’s property” (mushubutsu/無主物), but I say in all seriousness, the conclusion of my logic here is to say to TEPCO: “Hey, this is your crap” and return it to them. That way the residents are not forced to accept the stuff, TEPCO is. The best solution is to return all of the material back to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, but that is not possible. Right now that place is a battlefield between poorly paid workers and the radiation, so I don’t see this as a possibility.
What I would most like to do is have TEPCO’s headquarters buried under all the radiation, but whenever I say this people just laugh. (laughs)
I do have a second proposal. Fifteen kilometers south of Fukushima Daiichi [Fukushima 1] is the Fukushima dai-ni [Fukushima 2] nuclear plant. There is a lot of wide open space there. So first off we would return the Fukushima 1 contamination to TEPCO there. I think there would be enough space, but if there were not, the rest could be taken to TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki Kariya nuclear plant. It’s the world’s largest nuclear plant and so there is a lot of space. I think turning that place into a nuclear waste site is a good idea.
Lately I’ve been invited to Kashiwazaki11 and talked about it. I think I’ve become a hated man there. (Laughs). But I think taking full responsibility for various actions is the most important thing. And when it comes to this particular disaster no one has greater responsibility than TEPCO. As I think it important for one to take full responsibility, if Fukushima 2 doesn’t work out, then Kashiwazaki Kariya is the only other option.
Hirano: State expenditures for decontamination have supposedly reached one trillion yen.
Koide: It’s more than that.
Hirano: This summer I spent some time in Iitate village. Of course at the time the place was crawling with decontamination workers. It was a truly bizarre scene. I had the feeling of running around on a moonscape. Of course there were no residents there-just decontamination workers in strange gear, trucks running all over the place. Looking at that scene, being shown the actual work of decontamination, it seemed to be an excruciatingly slow―even endless―endeavor. I mean they were scrubbing everything with small brushes. I was able to ask the workers a few questions―off the record. Many were people from Hokkaido, Okinawa, and Fukushima who had lost their homes. It was a collection of modern day migrant workers and victims of disaster. They said that they work for just 15,000 yen a day.
I asked them if they thought their work was doing any good. They said they needed the money and honestly had no way of knowing if this sort of minute and delicate work would remove the contamination.
Was this a mistake? Is scrubbing everything by hand and then dumping it all in the ground really the only way to decontaminate an area?
Koide: Well I think both that it is and it isn’t effective. For example, when they first started the decontamination work, what they did was blasting everything with high-pressure water hoses. That’s bad. All that does is get all the contamination moving around. It’s really just dispersing it.
Some of my colleagues have said that is a bad method. Be it a roof or a wall, you shouldn’t just douse it with water. To really remove the contamination, you would first cover it with something that could prevent the escape of radioactivity then knock down the radiated structure, tear it all off, and then fold it up and collect it all. I think that’s probably true. But it takes a long time.
I think there are effective ways of doing it and I think there are ineffective ways. Still it is fundamentally impossible to erase the contamination and so it must be moved. The only thing we should be doing is thinking about the easiest way to relocate it all.
Hirano: That’s the meaning of “effective” in this situation isn’t it.
Koide: Right. So the current method may be rather small in scale. But for me even small-scale methods are necessary. As long as people are living there everything is necessary.
Of course, there’s legitimate criticism over the fact that this is a decontamination business and that the large construction companies are getting rich, but again, for me, as long as there are abandoned people still living there it all must be done.
Hirano: It was really a shock going there and seeing it. To see those workers and, honestly, their lack of conviction for the work. It was a really weird scene. No real enthusiasm, but rather one day after the other, contingent labor. The media has reported that the workers come from a few particular prefectures, but actually being there and talking to them, I could really get a true sense of the structure of economic inequality in Japan, that this sort of work found this kind of person, a person coming from economically precarious and socially marginalized backgrounds. In fact, you come to understand that decontamination work depends on these people.
For example, decontamination, or your preferred “relocation,” couldn’t those jobs be made more equitable―say by requiring TEPCO office workers, especially executives, to do it?
Koide: I’ve said that.
Hirano: You have? (Laughs).
Kasai: So…about the airborne radiation dosage and the soil contamination, there is a public entity that measures and publishes the airborne levels. But the soil contamination is not measured. I remember reading about Chernobyl that the soil contamination levels are the standard by which one gets the right to evacuation and refuge. But Japan only measures the air. And there are those who doubt the accuracy of the levels recorded. I thought the soil contamination had not been measured yet, but from what you mentioned earlier, we do know the extent of the contamination, don’t we?
Koide: Yes, we do.
Kasai: The actual levels?
Koide: With respect to soil contamination we more or less know the extent of it. We largely know which prefectures, which towns, and which villages―as well as how badly―have been contaminated. Four years after the disaster it has moved around. Radiation moves through the environment; it has a material existence and also does die out. I’m sure much has changed since immediately following the accident.
We have the data necessary to draw a map of the situation immediately following the accident, but we don’t have the data necessary to draw a map of the contamination today. That said, we basically know the extent of the soil contamination.
Kasai: Who is it that is making these measurements?
Koide: It is basically the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Some local governments took part as well. Some independent groups, as well as some local governments, took part in taking measurements back then. But for us the number one data source is the US military.
Hirano: I see; how is that?
Koide: They worked at truly amazing speed-and accuracy.
Hirano: Sorry if this next thought seems a bit of a tangent, but right after the accident both the US and Japan were looking at the same data. But their interpretations of it were extremely far apart. The US ordered all of its personnel to evacuate an area 80 km from Fukushima. While Japan’s largest evacuation zone was 20 km. Where does this disparity in evacuation zones come from? They are both looking at the same data. How do they arrive at such definitive and divergent judgments?
Koide: Well…and this was true for me, too, any nuclear specialist would have known on March 11th-March 12th at the latest-that there had been a meltdown. And this means, quite simply, that control had been lost. And once control is lost you simply don’t know what is going to happen next-or that’s what you must think at the time. Disaster preparedness must always imagine the worst-case scenario. If you don’t plan for the worst-case scenario it will be too late. What the US did was believe there had been a worst-case scenario-a meltdown-and so moved to take care of its people. That’s why they ordered an 80 km evacuation. I think this was the correct strategy. Japan didn’t do this. Japan was always thinking of the ideal, the best case scenario. They had to be thinking they could still get control and based their policy on that optimistic assumption. So they only declared a 20 km evacuation zone. I would say that from this conclusion two things may unfold: one is their desire to see this as a best-case scenario and the other is their inability to deal with it.
Hirano: What do you mean by their inability?
Koide: In a word, the Japanese state is incapable of functioning adequately when dealing with a disaster. That’s why they evacuated those within 20 km by bus but when it came to the 30 km zone they told those who could easily evacuate to do so and for all others to merely close their doors and windows.
Hirano: So there was no emergency management.
Koide: None. There simply is not a single person in the Japanese government who had thought an accident like this was possible. They all immediately fled the off-site center and so there was absolutely no emergency management―there couldn’t be. And because management was now impossible, there were no announcements. Even if they had declared an 80 km evacuation zone there were no emergency shelters. They had made no preparations, so there was nothing to be done.
Hirano: Last summer I interviewed Murakami Tetsuya 12 Just as the accident was happening he reached out to the government. But he got no response. He went to the prefecture. No response from them either. In the end he just used his own judgment. So really there was essentially zero emergency management in place. His thoughts at the time were to get the whole village to emigrate; that really there was nothing to do but to buy land and move to Hokkaido. He said these were his actual plans at the time. In fact, it would seem that the myth of safety has so totally permeated the bureaucracy that there really is no one who thinks about these things―wouldn’t you say?
Koide: That’s right. Not a single nuclear expert or policy maker ever seriously considered the possibility of an accident like this. I knew accidents were possible, and that when they happened the damage would be enormous; I had been commenting on the possibility, referring to some results of simulations. But still I would have thought the kind of disaster that happened at Fukushima was some kind of impossible nightmare―yet it actually happened. It was like the worse nightmare becoming a reality. And if even I thought this then all those pronuclear people surely never gave it a moment’s thought. And so when it actually happened, no one had thought about, let alone built a system to deal with it.
II The Responsibility of the Scientist and the Citizen
Kasai: In your books and lectures you often express strong respect for Tanaka Shōzō.13 Can you connect what you’ve just said to this as well?
Koide: Sure. I first became aware of Shōzō when I was in the student movement during the 1970s This was a time when there was close attention paid to Japan’s many pollution incidents, such as at Minamata. Personally I was working on nuclear power, but it was a time when, like it or not, we learned of all the harm that came along with building Japan into a modern nation. What I got from Shōzō was this epiphany that just like the Minamata disease right there before our eyes these sorts of pollution incidents went way back in Japanese history. With Japan’s decision to cast off Asia and follow the West after the Meiji Ishin of 1868 came these sorts of incidents, and the question within that was just how should one live? I learned the way Shōzō lived his life. I thought: Wow, it is possible to live that way; I must do it. Unfortunately I am completely unable to do so, but I never stop thinking that Shōzō’s was a wonderful way to live a life.
Hirano: Going back to an earlier discussion. You’ve repeatedly talked about the government’s responsibility, scientists’ responsibility, and individual responsibility. It would seem that this word “responsibility” is an extremely important keyword for you. You often emphasize it in your writing, too. What I want to ask concerns the issue of scientists’ special responsibility, a particular social responsibility. Scientists are often thought of as technicians, but this is not really the case. As a result, I feel you’ve pursued an intense interrogation of yourself as a scientist. As you’ve said you are not going to enter politics, could you connect this discussion of scientific responsibility to your earlier discussion of doing all that has fallen to you personally to do? How should we think about these two things?
Koide: I am in science and as such I have to take on the responsibility of a scientist-Just as a politician must take political responsibility. I think I mentioned this to you the last time, but I am an absolute individualist (tetteiteki na kojinshugisha/徹底的な個人主義 者). I don’t want to be constrained by anyone. I want to be able to decide my own life for myself. But because I’ve made this choice by myself I must also take full responsibility for that choice.
It’s two sides of the same coin. I don’t take orders from anyone. And this means that I alone bear the responsibility. It’s really as simple as saying: I’m a scientist and so I have the responsibility of a scientist.
Hirano: On this way of thinking about responsibility: “Who is the subject responsible?”―this way of thinking about it seems to be quite absent in contemporary Japan.
Koide: Right. People living in Japan today have not made decisions as individuals. They just “go with the flow;” as long as they follow the “authorities” whom they believe will guarantee the happiness of their individual selves. This seems true of education, too. Go to a slightly better school; get into a slightly better company; grow a bit more rich, a bit more grand. I think everyone is swept up in this current, and it’s really senseless.
I think it is extremely important that each and every individual live out their individuality. The absolute worst thing is for everyone to become blindly obedient to the “authorities,” yet this is the Japan we find ourselves in today. And so no one takes any responsibility. Living in such a society it is too easy to say, “It can’t be helped.” Everyone is thus able to blame the society as a whole; “It can’t be helped.” And so no one takes any individual responsibility.
The most extreme and obvious example was the war. Everyone would say: “It’s not my fault; I was deceived. The military were the culprits.” Saying this allows people to remain at a distance, indifferent. It is bad news for a nation when its citizens have only this view of responsibility.
Hirano: You’ve declared, “I am an absolute individualist.” Personally I am very interested in that statement. So could you speak a bit more concretely about the meaning of your individualism for how one lives a life? In other words, could you explain just what you mean by this “individualism?”
That is, in Japan being individualistic is more often a way to say egotistical; a sort of disregard of others. One should pursue one’s own interests―in English the word is “selfish” ― egocentric ― pursue your own egotistic advantage. Now this seems completely different from the way you use the term. Could you speak directly to this difference?
Koide: I think you’ve just done so.
Hirano: Did I? (Laughs). So that’s it then, just as I said? Still it’s clearly not selfishness.
Koide: No, I don’t think it’s about interests.
Hirano: It’s about values isn’t it?
Koide: Yes, it’s about personal values. You and I are different people. I am different again from Mr. Kasai. Why? Well our genetic information is different. I received a bundle of information from my parents. You and Mr. Kasai, too, are influenced by your genetic information. Every one of the over one hundred million Japanese is a unique human being; and every one of the over 7.3 billion people on earth are unique individuals.
History may keep moving on, and there is a big, wide world here on this planet earth. That said, right now, at this moment, and right now, in this place, I exist as an irreplaceable being. It is nothing but an absolute truth. You normally live in Los Angeles, but right now at this moment you are a person who is here. Mr. Kasai has come down from Tokyo. While acknowledging all the implications of being within the flow of history, we are all right here, right now.
In other words, every single individual human being has a different way of living a life; they are each unique. They have each lived a life that absolutely no one else could have lived. It is a real loss if they don’t live up to their full potential. Those are my thoughts.
So for my own unique self, and so for your own unique self, and Mr. Kasai’s own unique self, none of us should be compelled by someone else to do something (meirei o sarete/命令されて). If we don’t live our lives according to the will coming from deep within ourselves, that’s a real loss; we must all live with our values coming from within ourselves.
I am going to retire next March, but though I am the lowest ranked employee here― above me are assistant professors and professors ― because of the peculiar arrangements of working where I do, I am not compelled to take orders from anyone. I am the lowest ranked so of course there is also no one below me to order around. So I am in a position where I never take nor give orders. For me this is the ideal position to be in.
And so I can live out my own life according to my own values; I’m allowed to live a life that suits me. Now I found myself in this position largely by accident, and then chose to continue to live my life this way. Related to this, I am a human being and so will make mistakes, but these mistakes will be things that I have chosen, things that I have personally done so there is nothing to do but to take responsibility for them. This is what I mean when I say that responsibility is an extremely important word.
Hirano: Well, you’ve exhaustively criticized this competitive society. You’ve said that this competitive society has ruined Japan and destroyed life based on what you call responsibility.
Koide: Yes. Everyone is running towards the exact same goal. It’s ludicrous. You want to go that way; I want to go this way. I think this would be the ideal society. Full mutual recognition is a good thing.
Hirano: Does your view come from your personal experience? In your books you state that you were a really conscientious student when you were younger (laughs).
Koide: (laughs) Well, yes.
Hirano: You studied extremely hard. Did everything extremely hard. You continued this in your nuclear research in college believing that a new energy source was cheap and good for everyone. You must have thought this was a great thing.
Koide: That’s right.
Hirano: But you eventually noticed that it was all wrong. So on this, from deep in your own experience, it’s an individual history, an individual experience, in one sense it’s connected to your current individualism, to how you live your life focused on the important things to you.
Koide: I think that’s right. So, well, when I was young, in my late teens, I was consumed by the dream of nuclear power. I devoted my life to it. That was all a mistake―it did not take me too long to realize that.
Hirano: When did it happen? In graduate school?
Koide: My third year in university.
Hirano: Third year―so as an undergraduate.
Koide: Yes, I came to this realization in the latter half of my undergraduate studies. It was foolish and I curse myself for it, but I didn’t quit. To this day I’ve lived my life as someone who made that wrong choice, and there is nothing to do but make amends for that choice.
At a minimum I wanted to get rid of nuclear power before there was a bad accident. I guess I’ve lived with this wish for over forty years―but that wish stayed out of reach. And here we have had the accident so my life has been for nothing. You could say that thing I wanted most to do has been denied. Really, what have I lived for? I think about that from time to time.
As this was my choice I have to accept it. So while the meaning of my life may have been lost, still I was able to live my own life as I pleased, without submitting to the orders of others and without ordering others around―for this I am grateful. My hopes were never realized. History is full of that kind of thing. Likely very few people see their hopes fulfilled. And while in my case they were rejected, I was able to live the life I wanted and that is a life to be grateful for.
Hirano: In a way, it’s just how Tanaka Shōzō lived his life isn’t it?
Koide: Yes it is. That is what I like about Shōzō.
Hirano: On that point. His life, too, was a defeat.
Koide: Complete and total defeat.
Hirano: Still, he used all sorts of means, and followed all the way through on his beliefs.
Hirano: So getting back to Fukushima, it seems when it comes to the life choices of the so-called Japanese elites, they seem caught in a system in which they will succeed and become famous by crushing their individuality and subsuming it under some organization in order to get ahead in a society and achieve fame and status. And the education system seems to be promoting this lifestyle where these sorts of people are created through intense competition. I think the very end result of this social and educational system was revealed, and it exploded in an explicit and ugly manner through various problems the Fukushima disaster has posed.
Koide: Yes, I think so. You said it.
Hirano: I see. In one sense it would have been possible even for these Japanese elites to make their personal responsibility clear and take appropriate actions only if they had lived a life based on individualism as you suggested.
Koide: Yes I think such a possibility exists, but unfortunately in Japan today that possibility has been completely crushed. It was abundantly clear from the Fukushima disaster that no one in this country is going to take responsibility.
Hirano: You’ve already talked about how TEPCO and the government made huge mistakes in dealing with the problem immediately after the accident. What do you see as the definitive mistake that led to this disaster?
Koide: There’s a ton of them. Any specialist would have known right away there had been a meltdown, and that everyone needed to be evacuated immediately. And evacuating to 20 km away is totally inadequate. Iitate village some 40-50 km away received an enormous amount of contamination and was neglected for over a month.
Soma residents evacuated to Iitate, this kind of stupidity cannot stand, the government’s criminal mistakes.
Kasai: I’m deeply taken by your previous discussion on responsibility. It’s really a story of something with no owner. A golf course that has had to close because it is considered contaminated with radiation from TEPCO’s plant has recently sued. TEPCO’s top attorneys argued in defense that the radiation is not their property, which would make it no one’s property and therefore TEPCO is not responsible. It seems the opposite of what you’ve just said about responsibility, to be sure, yet this declaration of complete lack of responsibility, once passed through the logic and system of the courts, these lawyers have arrived at precisely this conclusion. It is not a question of individual responsibility; it is a problem of the social system. Lack of any responsibility is the basis of the entire social system. What are your thoughts on this?
Koide: It’s exactly as you say. This is what it has come to. I couldn’t care less about a country like that. But in order to overcome this situation, it’s something I mentioned earlier, but there is no way but for rather foolish citizens to get smarter. Only each individual standing up for his or her own way is going to do it.
Hirano: You’ve also talked about “responsibility for being fooled.” You’ve said that even the deceived are guilty and stressed that they too must take responsibility. How do you think about this at the individual level? For example, you’ve often stated that there should be a new food labeling system put in place by which especially the generation that agreed to build the reactors would be obliged to eat the contaminated food―would this be an example of taking individual responsibility for you?
Koide: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. So, because I think that every Japanese adult has responsibility for both allowing the rampant development of nuclear power and the Fukushima disaster, I said that they should be the ones to eat the contaminated food. And so that this disaster may never happen again, nuclear power must be eliminated―of course there should be no question of restarting the reactors. Yet, what I’ve just said is not really a widespread idea. Slowly all the reactors are being restarted.
Hirano: So in that sense Japanese citizens’ responsibility is increasing in that they are allowing the restart of the reactors.
Koide: I think the nuclear power issue is precisely analogous to the war.
Hirano: Indeed, as with the damage of misinformation and national morality discourse we talked about and the pressure that comes from those hints of someone being somehow “un-Japanese,” it seems to really resemble the war.
Koide: I think so, yes.
Hirano: I’d like to ask more about the responsibility for being misled. Up to now the reason most would say that nuclear power has been allowed is the myth of safety―a myth invented by the coordination of the government, TEPCO, and the media. So Japanese citizens have been robbed of being told the truth, of having the chance to know the truth.
Koide: That’s true.
Hirano: So the likely response to your position would be that it’s unjust to blame those who were robbed of the chance to know the truth. How would you answer this challenge?
Koide: I also said that the current situation is just like during the war. Then, too, the media only reported the information coming from imperial headquarters: The Japanese military enjoyed nothing but a string of victories. We were all told that because of the emperor Japan was a divine country and therefore could not lose. You would go to school and there would be the emperor’s portrait hanging on the wall. There was a place where the emperor was enshrined right there on school grounds. Every child was taught that the emperor was present there.
In such a country it wasn’t strange to think that Japan would win the war. But those who knew more about the world, including of course those in the military, knew that Japan could not win. Still they said nothing. And so everyone was swept along with the current.
But history is harsh, and in the end Japan was battered. And people at that time said, “Ah, we’ve been misled. The military are the culprits.” But even within all of this there were those who resisted the war. The number of people tortured and killed by the Special Higher Police was huge. And those people, too, were labeled as “un-Japanese” and ostracized from society by the majority of the population. Whole families, whole groups of people were obliterated.
So those who lived then were duped, they were given false information. But should they say that’s where their responsibility ends? I would respond that even if they were duped, the duped still bear the responsibility of the duped. How did each and every one of them live their lives during the war? How did they deal with the information they were being given? I think we need to include these kinds of questions when we interrogate ourselves over taking responsibility. Now if you say this people get angry but I think without question the emperor has absolute responsibility for the war. We ended up moving on without trying to pursue the emperor’s war responsibility.
Even today you’ll see people happily shouting “Tennō heika banzai,” Long Live the Emperor. At midnight NHK will broadcast the Japanese flag flapping in the wind. I can’t stand that and so don’t watch TV. Most Japanese get happy when they hear ‘honorable’ addresses by His Majesty the Emperor or news about the imperial family. From the bottom of my heart I think we should have pursued his war crimes and punished him with whatever it takes, including execution. I have been saying this and people get very angry.
I am told not to criticize the emperor. They say if I do I’ll harm the anti-nuclear movement.
Hirano: Even people in the anti-nuclear movement warn you about things like that? A critical reference to the emperor’s wartime responsibility could be fatally divisive for the movement?
Koide: Those roots are that strong when you talk about war responsibility. But as I have mentioned to you, I feel at the bottom of my heart that each and every individual must take personal responsibility for how he or she lived his or her life. That’s the reason why I wanted the emperor to take his responsibility as a person.
We must build such a country. Even the duped and the lied to have responsibility as individual human beings. It’s true for those who lived through the war, and it’s true for those who promote nuclear power in Japan today―indeed it’s true for everyone on earth. Each one, should they be deceived, is responsible for being deceived.
Hirano/Kasai: Well we’ve gone on long today and heard some really important things. Thank you very much.
Katsuya Hirano is Associate Professor of History at UCLA. He is the author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago). This interview is the second installment of his oral history project on Fukushima in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. The first interview was with Murakami Tatsuya: “Fukushima and the Crisis of Democracy: Interview with Murakami Tatsuya”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 20, No. 1, May 25, 2015.
Hirotaka Kasai is Professor of Political Thought at Tsuda College in Tokyo, Japan. He has published articles and book chapters on Maruyama Masao and radical democracy in Gendai Shiso and others.
Robert Stolz is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia. He is the author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke). He has published an article on Tanaka Shozo in The Asia-Pacific Journal: “Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shozo’s Philosophies of ‘Poison’ and ‘Flow’ and Japan’s Environment”, Vol. 5, Issue 1, January 2, 2007.
Akiko Anson is a freelance translator who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Anson obtained a BA degree in English Literature from Gakushūin University in Tokyo, Japan and an MA degree in Asian Studies from the University of Iowa.
Recommended citation: Katsuya Hirano and Hirotaka Kasai interview Koide Hiroaki, “The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is a Serious Crime”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 6, No. 1, March 15, 2016.
Notes
Social workers visit temporary housing in Motomiya, Fukushima Prefecture, to interview disaster victims in December.
By Mari Yamaguchi
The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains.
They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.
The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine.
Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by local residents, they typically work on three-to-six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested.
“They’re cleaning up radiation in Fukushima, doing sometimes unsafe work, and yet they can’t be proud of what they do or even considered legitimate workers,” said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who now heads a citizens’ group supporting decontamination laborers. “They are exploited by the vested interests that have grown in the massive project.”
Residents of still partly deserted towns such as Minamisoma, where 8,000 laborers are based, worry that neighborhoods have turned into workers’ ghettos with deteriorating safety. Police data shows arrests among laborers since 2011 have climbed steadily from just one to 210 last year, including a dozen yakuza, or gangsters, police official Katsuhiko Ishida told a prefectural assembly. Residents are spooked by rumors that some laborers sport tattoos linked with yakuza, and by reports that a suspect in serial killings arrested in Osaka last year had worked in the area.
“Their massive presence has simply intimidated residents,” said Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai. “Frankly, the residents need their help but don’t want any trouble.”
Most of the men work for small subcontractors that are many layers beneath the few giants at the top of the construction food chain. Major projects such as this one are divided up among contractors, which then subcontract jobs to smaller outfits, some of which have dubious records.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare examined more than 300 companies doing Fukushima decontamination work and found that nearly 70 committed violations in the first half of last year, including underpayment of wages and overtime and failure to do compulsory radiation checks. Those companies were randomly chosen among thousands believed to be working in the area.
“Violations are so widespread in this multilayer subcontract system. It’s like a whack-a-mole situation,” said Mitsuaki Karino, a city assemblyman in Iwaki, a Fukushima city where his civil group has helped workers with complaints about employers.
Karino said workers are sometimes charged for meals or housing they were told would be free, he said, and if they lose jobs or contracts aren’t renewed, some go homeless.
“It’s a serious concern, particularly for workers who don’t have families or lost ties with them,” he said.
Government officials say they see no other way than to depend on the contracting system to clean up the radiated zone, a project whose ballooning cost is now estimated at 5 trillion yen ($44 billion).
“That’s how the construction industry has long operated. In order to accomplish decontamination, we need to rely on the practice,” said Tadashi Mouri, a health and labor ministry official in charge of nuclear workers’ health. He said the ministry has instructed top contractors to improve oversight of subcontractors.
Several arrests have been made in recent months over alleged labor violations.
A complaint filed by a worker with labor officials led to the October arrest of a construction company president who had allegedly dispatched workers to Fukushima under misleading circumstances. The investigation found that the worker had been offered pay of 17,000 yen ($150) per day, but after middlemen took a cut he was getting only 8,000 yen ($70).
In another case, a supervisor and a crane operator were arrested in July for alleged illegal dumping of radiated plant debris in Minamisoma. Five companies heading the project were suspended for six weeks.
Most workers keep their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs. One laborer in a gray jacket and baggy pants, carrying cans of beer on his way home, said he was instructed never to talk to reporters.
A 62-year-old seasonal worker, Munenori Kagaya, said he had trouble finding jobs after he and his fellow workers fought for and won unpaid daily “danger” allowance of 10,000 yen ($88) for work in Tamura city in 2012.
Officials keep close tabs on journalists. Minutes after chatting with some workers in Minamisoma, Associated Press journalists received a call from a city official warning them not to talk to decontamination crews.
Beyond the work’s arduous nature, the men also face radiation exposure risks. Inhaling radioactive particles could trigger lung cancer, said Junji Kato, a doctor who provides health checks for some workers.
Although most laborers working in residential areas use protective gear properly, others in remote areas are not monitored closely, according to workers and Nakamura, the leader of the radiation workers support group. Many are not given compulsory training or education about dealing with radiation, he said.
Though group leaders’ radiation exposure levels are regularly checked, decontamination workers’ individual levels have not been systematically recorded. The government introduced a system in 2013 but only for a fee, and many lower subcontractor workers are likely not covered. Even non-alarmist experts say that workers doses must be kept individually for their own records as well as for studies of low-dose radiation impact.
Mouri, the government official, said decontamination workers’ average annual dose fell to 0.7 millisievert last year, a fraction of the 20-millisievert annual limit for those working at the nuclear plant, and is not a concern.
Though no radiation-induced illness has been detected, workers have developed diabetes, cerebral and respiratory problems, often long untreated due to lack of money, awareness and social ties, local hospital intern Toyoaki Sawano said in a medical magazine last month.
Having trouble making ends meet, a growing number of laborers are seeking welfare assistance, local authorities say. The officials worry that they may end up staying on, like construction laborers did in Osaka and Tokyo after the 1960s building boom, forming Japan’s poorest ghettos.
Police and volunteers have started neighborhood patrols amid concerns about safety. Some big construction companies have taken steps to address concerns. Hazama Ando Corp. imposed an 11 p.m. curfew on workers.
Residents say they avoid convenience stores in the evenings, when many laborers stop by after work to buy snacks, bento boxes or beer on their way home. Some of them used to discard their contaminated gloves and masks in garbage bins there, triggering complaints from the neighborhood and prompting the government to launch a “manner” campaign in December.
At a convenience store in Minamisoma on a recent evening, workers came in waves, waiting quietly in line to pay for food and other items.
“The workers face heartless rumors as if they are all reckless outlaws. They are the same human beings. Like anywhere, there are good guys and bad guys,” said Nakamura, the support group leader.
One resident grateful for the workers is Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk who keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.
“We owe a lot to those who clean this town, doing the work that locals don’t even want to,” he said.
Minamisoma city official Tomoyuki Ohwada said the worker population should decline next year, when intensive decontamination efforts are scheduled to end. But Kinoshita believes many will still be needed, given the amount of work left to do.
“There is no end to this job,” Kinoshita said. “Five years from now, the workers will still be around. And more unclaimed ashes may end up here.”
FIVE YEARS AFTER: 1 in 3 Fukushima evacuees giving up hope of ever returning home
Social workers visit temporary housing in Motomiya, Fukushima Prefecture, to interview disaster victims in December.
More than one in three evacuees from the Fukushima nuclear disaster despair of ever returning home, a finding that points to a growing sense of hopelessness five years after the crisis unfolded.
This stark reality emerged in a survey carried out by The Asahi Shimbun and a research team headed by Akira Imai, a professor of local government policy at Fukushima University.
“There are so many people (outside Fukushima) today who are not aware that many people are still forced to live as evacuees,” a 34-year-old woman responded in the survey questionnaire. “No matter how we try to explain our plight, they seem unable to understand, and we feel saddened to realize that people tend to think we live outside our hometowns out of our own choice.”
Many respondents also wrote they were troubled by a perceived envy from other residents in their new communities over the compensation they receive from Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
In the survey, of those who remain evacuated, 22 percent said they think they can return to their old homes within five years, 17 percent believe they can return home within 10 years and 9 percent said it might take up to 20 years.
Fourteen percent said it will take 21 years or longer to return home, while the remaining 38 percent said they believed they would never be able to return permanently.
As of March 9, the number of Fukushima residents living as evacuees within Fukushima Prefecture stood at 54,175. On Feb. 12, prefectural authorities reported that 43,149 evacuees were living outside the prefecture.
It was the fifth such survey by The Asahi Shimbun and Imai’s research team and was undertaken to mark the fifth anniversary of the nuclear accident, triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, on March 11.
Questionnaires were sent to 398 evacuees who had responded to previous polls. Of the 225 respondents in Tokyo and 20 prefectures, 36, or 16 percent, said they had returned to their old homes.
Among those who remain evacuated, 65 people currently live in temporary housing for disaster victims, followed by 52 who have settled in homes they newly purchased.
Forty-one percent of those who remain evacuated said they want to eventually return to their old homes when their hometowns become safe, while 25 percent said they no longer want to return because it is unlikely the areas will ever be safe again.
The survey showed that evacuees are increasingly losing the will to hold on in their current plight, with only 32 percent of respondents saying they are determined to hold on, down from 55 percent in the previous survey in 2013.
Eighteen percent said they are losing the will to hold on. The same percentage said they are tormented by simmering anger. Both figures were up from the previous survey.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201603100059
FIVE YEARS AFTER: Local Fukushima disaster evacuation plans ignore central government instructions
“The central government’s guidelines are simply a desk theory,” said a local government official in Ibaraki Prefecture. “The harder you work on your evacuation plan, the more unrealistic it gets.”
Although the town of Namie is still evacuated five years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, local officials are already at odds with the central government over evacuation plans for any similar crisis.
In its draft emergency plan, the town in Fukushima Prefecture decrees that residents can flee in a future accident even if radiation levels are below those warranting evacuation as dictated by the central government.
The draft was drawn up based on the lesson the disaster-hit town learned from the chaos that erupted in the wake of the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in 2011.
Although local governments are legally entitled to issue an order independently, the central government is not happy about Namie’s plan. Minami-Soma, the city adjacent to Namie, takes a similar approach in the evacuation plan it crafted in 2013.
The secretariat of the Nuclear Regulation Authority would not give a nod to the plans by Namie and Minami-Soma, saying such actions could compromise the evacuation of people facing imminent danger.
“In the Fukushima accident, more damage was done partly because people who were not in need of evacuation raced to flee,” said an official with the secretariat’s Emergency Preparedness/ Response and Nuclear Security Division. “The central government’s guidelines are designed to minimize radiation exposure risks.”
All the roads around Namie, located to the northwest of the crippled plant, were clogged with vehicles desperately trying to flee, hampering evacuation. Shelters were so packed that they could not accommodate all who rushed to them.
Namie Mayor Tamotsu Baba said the town, with a population of 18,700, has a responsibility to ensure smooth evacuation of residents by issuing an order on its own, instead of adhering to the central government’s guidelines formulated after the Fukushima accident.
“It is not easy to evacuate in an orderly fashion,” said Baba. “A panic will very likely occur if an accident comparable to the Fukushima nuclear disaster takes place.”
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the central government obliged 135 municipalities situated within a 30-kilometer radius of a nuclear facility to formulate evacuation plans under its new guidelines for responding to a nuclear disaster.
The guidelines call for the immediate evacuation of residents living within a 5-km radius of the site of a severe accident.
Residents within a 5- to 30-km zone, such as Namie and Minami-Soma, which are within 30 km of both the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear plants, are urged to stay indoors. They would be asked to evacuate within a few hours of radiation levels reaching 500 microsieverts an hour.
However, that is such a high radiation level that no municipalities more than 5 km from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant experienced in the 2011 crisis, according to the NRA’s secretariat.
The guidelines also state that residents must evacuate within a week if radiation measuring 20 microsieverts an hour continues for at least 24 hours. These steps are recommended based on the idea that it would do more damage to the elderly to evacuate than to stay indoors. The guidelines are also aimed at preventing traffic gridlock so that residents living near a crippled facility can promptly flee to safety.
A serious situation could unfold again in Fukushima Prefecture if work to cool spent nuclear fuel rods were rendered impossible by a natural disaster or terror attack at the plants.
Before the Fukushima disaster, Namie was not asked by the central government to have an evacuation plan in place, just like the rest of the municipal governments beyond the 5-km range from a nuclear facility.
An evacuation order from either the central government or Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the embattled plant, failed to reach Namie due to the escalating chaos following the nuclear crisis in 2011. So the town government was forced to act alone to evacuate its residents.
Namie officials believe that even if people are only asked to flee within a week after a reading of radiation hit 20 microsieverts an hour under the new guidelines, some will choose anyway to evacuate immediately.
The officials said they would rather ensure smooth evacuation of local residents by acting independently of the central government.
In the case of Minami-Soma, residents were ordered to stay indoors due to the risk of radiation exposure at the time of the Fukushima accident.
But 55,000 of a total of 70,000 people evacuated voluntarily in the face of the scarcity of food in the city after the distribution network was jeopardized.
The NRA secretariat acknowledges that it will have to address the issue of how to distribute food and other relief aid to areas where people are asked to remain indoors as radiation levels rise.
Of the 135 municipalities, only 95 cities, towns and villages came up with evacuation plans.
But some in the prefectures of Ibaraki and Shizuoka are still void of their response measures since they have been unable to find shelters to accommodate all of the would-be evacuees.
The overall population in the 30-km zone in the two prefectures is nearly 1 million each, making the task formidable.
“The central government’s guidelines are simply a desk theory,” said a local government official in Ibaraki Prefecture. “The harder you work on your evacuation plan, the more unrealistic it gets.”
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201603100018
INTERVIEW/ Kazuya Tarukawa: Reality of Fukushima is unrecoverable, uncompensable
Farmer Kazuya Tarukawa at his greenhouse in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture
Kazuya Tarukawa, a farmer in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture, found himself in the media spotlight after his father committed suicide in the early stages of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Tarukawa recounted how his gratifying life as a farmer drastically changed on March 11, 2011.
He also shared his thoughts on the compensation system, rumors about Fukushima products, and how Tokyo Electric Power Co. sent him a fax instead of a direct apology for his father’s death.
Excerpts of the interview follow:
* * *
Question: What are things like five years after the disaster started?
Tarukawa: Radioactive materials fell on this central strip of Fukushima Prefecture, too. Rice paddies, farm fields and plastic greenhouses were all ruined, so our “workplaces” were contaminated. But Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the crippled nuclear plant, has not compensated us for lost assets or removed the radioactive substances.
Five years have passed, and that’s it. We have only sustained damage and suffering. I keep asking myself, “Why do we have to go through all this?”
We did receive 80,000 yen ($706) in the first year of the disaster and 40,000 yen in the second year for psychological suffering, but that was all. The thinking behind the payments was probably like, “Here’s 120,000 yen, so keep your mouth shut and wait for the radiation levels to go down on their own.”
How can that make up for the damage we sustained?
Q: I have been told that your father was dedicated to organic farming of vegetables. Could you elaborate?
A: He cared a lot about the environment. He began growing winter cabbage because you never get worms, even without a single disinfection, in winter. The cabbage grows under the snow and develops quite a sweet taste. All local schools were using our cabbage in their school lunches.
He was so happy to be feeding children with something really safe and tasty. He was once invited by school officials to give a talk about food education. He was proud of things like that.
He hanged himself on the morning the day after the central government told him to stop shipping his vegetables. Around 7,500 pre-harvest cabbages were ruined. His farmland was contaminated. His heart was probably heavy while he was wondering how he would get on with his life.
Q: You reached a settlement in the case through the intermediary of the Nuclear Damage Compensation Dispute Resolution Center, whereby TEPCO acknowledged a causal relation with the disaster. Could you elaborate on that?
A: I took the case to the center because I wanted to avenge my father so he would not die in vain. I finally won the settlement and received damages. I thought that TEPCO people would finally come to my place to offer incense and apologize. But that never happened. I got a fax instead.
Q: How is the cleanup work going?
A: Our rice paddies were cleaned up. The ground was plowed to about 40 centimeters using a big tractor, sprinkled with zeolite and then plowed again. We were told that the zeolite will absorb radioactive substances in the soil, and that’s the cleanup thing.
But it doesn’t make sense. Rice may stop pulling up radioactive materials, but the absolute amount in the soil remains the same.
We are toiling every day from morning until evening on contaminated soil. We are filled with anxiety about what will become of us in the future, and whether we might suffer the impact someday.
When we were negotiating with the central government, I repeatedly asked farm ministry officials on the podium: “Do you know the first kanji in the Japanese word for ‘cleanup?’ (The kanji means “remove.”) You are just stirring things up. How can that amount to a ‘cleanup?’”
Everyone then cast their eyes low at their documents. They must have thought I was right.
Q: Isn’t there a way to strip away the contaminated surface soil?
A: We would be luckier if only there was a way to strip it off in thin slices. But in the month after the disaster started, the prefectural government gave us directions, saying it was OK to plow the ground. I didn’t quite believe in that stuff, but everybody did plow the ground.
We shouldn’t have done the plowing thing back then. They could have told us to stop growing crops for a year, and you will be compensated for that. That was a big moment when the sides parted.
It’s easy to strip off soil with a machine. But if you remove 40 cm of soil, you wouldn’t get decent crops. It takes tens of years to make just 1 cm of fine, fluffy soil.
I stick to what I am doing because I don’t want to let my rice paddies go to ruin during my time, the time of the eighth generation.
The paddies would quickly go to ruin if you didn’t do anything about them and just let them lie around. That would also cause trouble with your neighbors. Come to think of it, if you didn’t grow anything, you also wouldn’t be getting compensation money, and you would be left without income. You couldn’t maintain your living.
Q: What compensation are you getting for the farm products you grow?
A: We are only being compensated for crops with records of sale and proof that we suffered damage. For example, if you sold something at 2,000 yen before the disaster but now are making only 1,500 yen from it, TEPCO will compensate you for the difference.
But we have not been compensated for cucumbers for the past two years because their prices soared due to the unseasonable weather. People are saying stuff like, “We are not paying you because you are selling them at higher prices than you did before the disaster.”
It’s funny, huh? We would be making more money if it were not for the disaster. We are getting less than in other prefectures. You know, TEPCO is loath to shell out money.
And there are so many things that we have no way to seek damages for. Things that will never be with us again. We used to grow shiitake mushrooms at our homestead every year for consumption. Butterbur sprouts and Japanese angelica tree shoots from the mountains–they have all been spoiled. But we are getting nothing for that.
Q: What about the impact of negative publicity?
A: The 2011 harvest of rice from our paddies measured up to 30 becquerels or so in radioactive content. That was a safe enough level because the regulation standard was 500 becquerels (per kilogram; 100 becquerels from fiscal 2012) or less. But it’s something that you are putting in your mouth, after all.
Frankly, I didn’t want to eat it myself. Well, I did eat it because I couldn’t have gone shopping elsewhere.
But I do have a sense of guilt about making shipments. So I know very well why Tokyoites don’t feel like eating things from Fukushima. Who would want to buy stuff to eat from a place with such a stupid old nuclear plant?
It’s not about “negative publicity.” You suffer from “negative publicity” when your sales have dropped because groundless rumors have spread. But our case is not like that. Everything is well-grounded. The radioactive materials actually fell.
Q: Do they still continue to be detected?
A: No radioactive materials were detected in rice last year and the year before last. In fact, we have done everything we can. We are spraying potassium chloride, which suppresses the absorption of radioactive substances, every year.
All bags of rice are being screened, and when you get measurement figures, you are not allowed to ship them. I believe that rice from Fukushima is now much safer than rice from other prefectures.
And our rice is selling well, in fact, in the restaurant industry and in hospitals because you may never know that the product is from Fukushima Prefecture. You may not see a lot on the surface, but vast quantities are on the move. Because Fukushima rice tastes good. It’s sticky and sweet. So restaurant industry people seem to be happy because they can buy tasty rice at cheap prices.
Q: What about vegetables?
A: Greenhouses were under plastic covers at the time of the disaster, so the soil in there was never contaminated. I decided to grow everything in greenhouses, so I have almost stopped growing things outdoors, including cabbage, because I don’t want to see measurement figures in my crops again.
I am now growing broccoli, but the prices are so cheap, beaten down. Urbanites don’t bother to differentiate between broccoli grown in greenhouses and those grown in open fields as long as they are from Fukushima Prefecture.
Q: Nuclear reactors are being brought back online these days. Your thoughts?
A: Japan remained free of nuclear power for some time. But look, was there any part of Japan where everything was pitch-dark at night during that time? We certainly had enough electricity.
We may have paid more for crude oil, and nuclear power may be cheaper in fuel costs. But think about it: How much do you have to pay to clean up after a disaster when one happens? It’s really a burden. What would become of this country if another nuclear plant were to fail somewhere? You could raise taxes, but would that be the end of it?
Q: With whom do you want to share your feelings now?
A: I could be better off if I didn’t raise my voice and kept silent. But I am somebody in the media spotlight because of my father. There are hosts of other farmers who feel like I do, that something is wrong. It’s not in my power, after all, to hold my voice about such feelings. Doing that is dishonest.
That’s why I decided to appear in the movie (“Daichi wo Uketsugu” (Taking over Mother Earth), a 2015 documentary directed by Junichi Inoue). I particularly want farmers in areas hosting nuclear plants to watch this film. I want them to know what will happen when there is a disaster.
My father used to say: “Human-made things will certainly fail someday. Nothing can stand the forces of nature.” And things have turned out exactly like that. And after five years, nobody has taken responsibility.
* * *
Born in 1975, Kazuya Tarukawa worked for a company in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, after graduating from a university. He returned to his family home in Sukagawa, 65 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, 10 years ago to engage in farming.
Daily grind of decommissioning continues for workers at Fukushima plant
FUKUSHIMA – Five years after the March 2011 nuclear calamity started at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s efforts to contain the radioactive water at the site still makes headlines.
But not much is known about the daily lives and operations of some 7,000 workers at the plant engaged in decommissioning and other tasks.
To offer a glimpse of the workplace, Kyodo News followed Yasuki Hibi, 52, who heads major contractor Kajima Corp.’s civil engineering office at the wrecked plant, for a day last month. His office takes on a number of projects, including processing contaminated water and highly radioactive rubble.
“I feel that time has stopped here since that day,” said Hibi. “By taking part in the decommissioning work, I hope to let time flow again. Some of the workers were brought up in the local area, doing their best despite the circumstances.”
Hibi leaves his apartment in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, about 50 km south of the complex, just before 8 a.m., dropping by at Kajima’s Iwaki office to check paperwork before traveling to another office in the town of Tomioka and then the nuclear plant. His wife and son live in Tokyo.
Kajima’s office at the plant is located in a building by the main gate. The building serves as a resting place for workers at the complex and houses offices for other firms engaged in decommissioning work.
Around 100 workers a day, including from affiliated companies, come and go at the Kajima office. The contractor is in charge of building sea walls near the plant aimed at prevent radiation-contaminated water from spilling into the ocean, as well as transporting highly radioactive soil to designated sites.
Hibi was posted to Kajima’s Fukushima plant office in January 2011, two months before the earthquake and tsunami struck. At the time, his job was to reinforce the earthquake resistance of reactors 5 and 6, which survived the disaster.
But after March 11, 2011, Kajima’s mission was focused on removing vehicles scattered by the tsunami and building a temporary sea wall, he said.
“Of Kajima’s civil engineering sections, the office at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is unique,” Hibi said. “The radiation level in the air has dropped significantly, but there still are many hot spots around the reactor buildings.”
When Hibi arrives at the office, he makes sure the day’s work is in progress as scheduled. Some 20 workers on the early shift are already working at the complex by then.
Lunchtime is one of the few occasions where workers can relax.
The building’s eatery offers five different menu items, ranging from set meals to rice bowl dishes and noodles, and they are served at ¥380 with extra-large helpings for free. The food is cooked at a kitchen about 9 km away and carried there warm. Before the eatery opened, workers had to buy boxed lunches at convenience stores.
A large portion of Hibi’s work focuses on ensuring workers’ safety.
“Many other firms are involved and there are many cases in which workers need to work in small areas,” Hibi said. “I pay attention so that we won’t cause accidents.”
When he holds a meeting with staff who oversee the work site, Hibi asks detailed questions to avoid possible problems.
“Has there been anything wrong with the equipment recently?” Hibi asks the workers. “Is there any frost on the pipes?”
At noon, about 20 workers on the noon shift gather in the office, sitting in a circle for a meeting with Hibi. Afterward, they stand and together say: “Be safe!”
The workers change into disposable protective gear, including two thin rubber gloves on top of cotton ones. Adhesive tape is used to seal the gloves to the protective clothing so radiation won’t seep in.
Names and affiliations are written on the back and front of the protective gear in big, bold letters to clarify who’s who.
Workers appear used to the drill they have conducted for the past five years. One notable change is the half-face mask covering their mouth and nose, replacing a full-face mask used early on.
After seeing them off, Hibi also heads to the No. 1 reactor building, where workers are preparing to pour a bulking agent into an underground trench.
The radiation level is relatively high in this area, recording around 170 microsieverts per hour. A commercial flight between Tokyo and New York exposes passengers to about 10 microsieverts per hour. About 10 workers wear black vests made of tungsten over their protective gear. The vests reportedly reduce the radiation exposure to internal organs by 30 percent.
“Make sure that you are properly equipped to prevent a fall,” Hibi says to a worker through his mask. Checking various sites on the plant takes about two hours.
At 3:30 p.m., workers return to the office. Their working hours are limited to prevent excessive radiation exposure.
Shortly after 4 p.m., Hibi leaves the Kajima office. However, his day is not over yet. He heads to the firm’s office in Iwaki to check on upcoming construction schedules. It is close to 9 p.m. when he arrives back at his apartment.
Hibi’s day only illustrates a portion of what is going on at the Fukushima plant and he is well aware that the task of decommissioning has a long way to go.
“When I was involved in a project to dig a tunnel for a subway in Taiwan, I went to ride the train after it was completed,” Hibi said. “But decommissioning at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant won’t be completed anytime soon.
“I hope that when I turn 80-something, I can visit here and see how much progress has been made.”
Fukushima Report: 10,000 Excess Cancers Expected in Japan as a Result of 2011 Reactor Meltdowns, Ongoing Radiation Exposure
Report Gauges Cancer Prospects for Children, Rescue/Recovery Worker, and General Population; Japanese Government Criticized for “Disturbing” Failure to Examine Wider Radiation-Related Diseases
WASHINGTON, D.C. & BERLIN – March 9, 2016 – Residents of the Fukushima area and the rest of Japan will experience more than 10,000 excess cancers as a result of radiation exposure from the triple-reactor meltdown that took place on March 11, 2011, according to a new report from Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).
Titled “5 Years Living With Fukushima” and available online at www.psr.org/FukushimaReport2016, the PSR/IPPNW report laments that the full impact of Fukushima may never be known, due to Japan’s failure to immediately and fully track radiation exposures, as well as a “disturbing” lack of testing of the general population for radiation-related diseases and other impacts (miscarriages, fetal malformations, leukemia, lymphomas, solid tumors or non-cancerous diseases). The massive initial radioactive emissions were not recorded at the time of the triple-reactor meltdown and some radioactive isotopes (including strontium-90) have not been measured at all.
The PSR/IPPNW report uses the best available science and data to gauge the excess cancer rates among children, rescue and clean-up workers, and the general population of Japan. In addition to the 200,000 Fukushima residents relocated nearby into makeshift camps, the exposed include millions of others in Japan as a result of fallout-contaminated food, soil and water. Fukushima is often incorrectly seen as a “past” event; the reality is that radioactive emissions from the wrecked reactors continue to this day both into the atmosphere and in the form of 300 tons of leakage each day into the Pacific Ocean.
Key findings of the PSR/IPPNW report include the following:
- Children. “116 children in Fukushima Prefecture have already been diagnosed with aggressive and fast-growing, or already metastasizing, thyroid cancer – in a population this size about one to five case per year would normally be expected. For 16 of these children a screening effect can be excluded as their cancers developed within the last two years.”
- Workers. “More than 25,000 cleanup and rescue workers received the highest radiation dose and risked their health, while preventing a deterioration of the situation at the power plant site. If data supplied by the operator TEPCO is to be believed, around 100 workers are expected to contract cancer due to excess radiation, and 50 percent of these will be fatal. The real dose levels, however, are most likely several times higher, as the operator has had no qualms in manipulating the data to avoid claims for damages – from hiring unregistered temporary employees to tampering with radiation dosimeters and even crude forgery.”
- The rest of Japan. “The population in the rest of Japan is exposed to increased radiation doses from minor amounts of radioactive fallout, as well as contaminated food and water. Calculations of increased cancer cases overall in Japan range from 9,600 to 66,000 depending on the dose estimates.”
Catherine Thomasson, MD, report co-editor, and executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility, said: “The health legacy of Fukushima will haunt Japan for years to come and it cannot be wished out of existence by cheerleaders for nuclear power. Unfortunately, the pro-nuclear Japanese government and the country’s influential nuclear lobby are doing everything in their power to play down and conceal the effects of the disaster. The high numbers of thyroid cancers already verified with 50 additional waiting for surgery in the children of Fukushima prefecture is astounding. The aim seems to be to ensure the Fukushima file is closed as soon as possible and the Japanese public returns to a positive view of nuclear power. This rush to re-embrace nuclear power is dangerous to the extent that it sweeps major and very real medical concerns under the rug.”
Dr. Alex Rosen, pediatrician and vice-chair, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, said: “One is of course reminded of the tobacco lobby disputing the notion that the horrific effects of its products have no adverse health impacts. This self-serving falsehood echoed for decades was made possible simply because the long-term health effects of smoking were not immediately observable. The 10,000 to 66,000 people who will develop cancer solely as a result of the “manmade disaster” are neither ‘negligible’ nor ‘insufficient,’ as Japanese authorities, the nation’s nuclear lobby, and various industry-dominated international bodies, would have you believe.”
Tim Mousseau, PhD, professor of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, said: “It is unfortunate that, in some regards, we have better and more complete data about the impacts of Fukushima radiation on trees, plants and animals than we do on humans. We are seeing higher mortality rates, reduction in successful reproduction and significant deformities. A great deal of this research has been done to date and it has troubling implications. The research findings should be heeded to direct human studies, particularly regarding the question of genetic and transgenerational effects of radiation.”
Robert Alvarez, senior scholar specializing in nuclear disarmament, environmental, and energy policies, Institute for Public Studies, and former senior policy advisor, US Department of Energy, said: “Radioactive fallout from the reactors has created de faco ‘sacrifice zones’ where human habitation will no longer be possible well into the future. In November 2011, the Japanese Science Ministry reported that long-lived radioactive cesium had contaminated 11,580 square miles (30,000 sq km) of the land surface of Japan. Some 4,500 square miles – an area almost the size of Connecticut – was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s allowable exposure rate of 1 mSV(millisievert) per year. Fourteen of the nation’s 54 reactors are permanently shut down as they are on fault lines and only four have been restarted.”
The PSR/IPPNW report also cautions that Fukushima was far from a one-time radiation incident: “The wrecked reactors have been leaking radioactive discharge since March 2011, despite assurances by the nuclear industry and institutions of the nuclear lobby such as the International Atomic Energy Organization that a singular incident occurred in spring 2011, which is now under control. This statement ignores the continuous emission of long-lived radionuclides such as cesium-137 or strontium-90 into the atmosphere, the groundwater and the ocean. It also ignores frequent recontamination of affected areas due to storms, flooding, forest fires, pollination, precipitation and even clean-up operations, which cause radioactive isotopes to be whirled into the air and spread by the wind. Thus, several incidents of new contamination with cesium-137 and strontium-90 have been discovered during the past years, even at considerable distance beyond the evacuation zone.”
The report also notes: “Finally, there are frequent leaks at the power plant itself – particularly from the cracked underground vaults of the reactor buildings and from containers holding radioactive contaminated water, which were hastily welded together and already exhibit numerous defects. According to TEPCO, 300 tons of radioactive wastewater still flow unchecked into the ocean every day – more than 500,000 tons since the beginning of the nuclear disaster. The amount and composition of radioactive isotopes fluctuate widely so that it is not possible to ascertain the actual effect this radioactive discharge will have on marine life. What is clear, however, is that increasing amounts of strontium-90 are being flushed into the sea. Strontium-90 is a radioactive isotope that is incorporated into living organisms in a similar way to calcium – in bones and teeth. As it travels up the marine food chain, it undergoes significant bioaccumulation and, because of its long biological and physical half-lives, will continue to contaminate the environment for the next hundreds of years.”
ABOUT THE GROUPS
Physicians for Social Responsibility has been working for more than 50 years to create a healthy, just and peaceful world for both the present and future generations. PSR advocates on key issues of concern by addressing the dangers that threaten communities. www.psr.org.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War is a non-partisan federation of national medical groups in 64 countries, representing tens of thousands of doctors, medical students, other health workers, and concerned citizens who share the common goal of creating a more peaceful and secure world freed from the threat of nuclear annihilation. www.ippnw.org
http://www.psr.org/news-events/press-releases/fukushima-report-10000-excess-cancers-japan.html
Radiation fears keep Japan’s nuclear refugees from returning
TOKYO (AP) — They feel like refugees, although they live in one of the world’s richest and most peaceful nations.
Five years ago, these people fled their homes, grabbing what they could, as a nearby nuclear plant melted down after being hit by a tsunami, spewing radiation. All told, the disaster in Fukushima displaced 150,000 by the government’s count.
About 100,000 are still scattered around the nation, some in barrack-like temporary housing units and others in government-allocated apartment buildings hundreds of kilometers (miles) away.
Although authorities have started to open up areas near the damaged reactors that were previously off limits, only a fraction of residents have returned. For example, in the town of Naraha, where evacuation orders were lifted in September, 459 people, or 6 percent of the pre-disaster population, have gone back.
Most say they don’t want to return for fear of lingering radiation. Some don’t want the upheaval of moving again after trying to start their lives over elsewhere.
With government housing aid set to end next year, many feel pressured to move back.
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Tokiko Onoda, 80, lives with her husband in a cramped, cluttered apartment on the 21st floor of a high-rise in the edge of Tokyo where about 1,000 people displaced by the disaster live in rent-free housing.
Several Fukushima towns that were deserted now are urging residents to return, saying it is safe to live in certain areas. An ambitious effort to decontaminate vast swaths of land by removing topsoil and razing shrubbery has turned farmland and coastlines into stretches of dirt with rows upon rows of black garbage bags filled with grass, soil and debris.
When housing aid ends in April 2017, people in apartments under the government program will have to start paying rent or move out. Those whose homes in Fukushima that are in areas still off-limits for living will continue to receive the aid.
Onoda fears hers will be cut off because her home is in Namie, where evacuation orders are gradually being lifted in parts of the town.
She doesn’t believe it’s safe to go back. She feels duped because she had believed that nuclear power was safe.
Onoda angrily talks about how authorities are treating people like her. Why didn’t the government give her land elsewhere to build a new home?
When she lived in Fukushima, she had a big house with a garden where she grew vegetables and peonies. She picked mushrooms and ferns in the hills.
“We worked so hard to build that house,” she said, often stopping to wipe away tears. “We had no worries in the world except to plan vacation trips to the hot springs.”
That home is now in shambles. Although it survived the 9.0 magnitude quake on March 11, 2011, burglars have ransacked it and rats have chewed the walls. The last time she visited, the dosimeter ticked at 4 microsieverts an hour, more than 100 times the average monitored in-air radiation in Tokyo. That’s not immediately life-threatening but it makes Onoda feel uncomfortable because of worries that cancer or other sicknesses may surface years later.
Before the disaster, the government had set the safe annual radiation dosage level at 1 millisievert. Afterward, it has adopted the 20 millisievert recommendation of the International Commission on Radiation Protection set for emergencies, and 1 millisievert became a long-term goal.
Onoda says she has done her best to cope. She has made friends. She keeps busy with tea parties, art classes and a sewing circle.
And now they want her to go back, after all she has gone through?
“Only someone who has gone through this evacuation can understand,” she said.
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Ryuichi Kino, a journalist who wrote, edited and compiled the 2015 book, “The White Paper on Nuclear Evacuees,” believes people like Onoda have been treated like “kimin,” which means “people who have been discarded” because they have been forgotten or abandoned by society.
“We don’t even know their real numbers,” he said, noting the government lacks a clear definition for “evacuees,” and bases its figures on tallies of those receiving aid. A recent count in Fukushima and a neighboring prefecture found the total number may be as high as 200,000, Kino said.
“Evacuation is a term that assumes the situation is temporary, and there is a place to go back,” said Kino.
The government is spending about 40 billion yen ($400 million) a year on housing aid for those displaced by the disaster. It’s also financially backing Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, to make monthly compensation payments, now at a cumulative 5.9 trillion yen ($59 billion) and rising.
Tests with volunteers who wore dosimeters for two weeks in the town of Naraha found average radiation exposure to be at a rate of 1.12 millsieverts a year.
Government official Yuji Ishizaki, who is overseeing the lifting of evacuation orders, says he is merely following policy.
“There is no clear boundary for what is safe or not safe for radiation,” he said. “Even 1 millisievert might not be absolutely safe.”
Fukushima Medical University, the main academic body studying the health effects of the nuclear disaster, says no sickness linked to radiation has been detected so far, although sickness from lack of exercise, poor diet and mental stress has been observed.
The more than 100 cases of thyroid cancer found among the 370,000 people 18 years old and younger at the time of the disaster the university calls “a screening effect,” or a result of more rigorous testing.
Some scientists say that is unusually high, given that thyroid cancer among children is rare at two or three in a million. Thyroid cancers among the young surged in the Ukraine and Belarus after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
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Seiichi Nakate is relatively content in his new life with his wife and two children, 13 and 11, in the northern city of Sapporo, 600 kilometers (370 miles) from Fukushima. There, some 1,500 people from Fukushima have formed a support network, often getting together for drinks and helping each other find jobs.
Nakate recently bought a house and started a company that refers professional helpers to disabled people, and has hired former Fukushima residents. He vows to never return to Fukushima because of the radiation danger.
He believes that from the beginning, authorities underplayed those risks. He doesn’t trust them.
After the disaster, he immediately sent his wife and children to a relatives’ home in southern Japan. The family started living together in Sapporo a year later.
The end of government housing support makes people feel pressure to return, he says.
“The government abandoned the people of Fukushima, even the children. Now the policy is to push us to go back,” he said. “It’s a policy that forces radiation upon people.”
Megumi Okada, a mother of four, is fighting hard to keep her housing aid in Tokyo, getting people to sign petitions and meeting with government officials.
She scoffs at how officials keep saying that people are living “as normal” in much of Fukushima. She doesn’t want her children eating the food or breathing the air. They get periodic blood tests to make sure they are healthy.
Her husband has found a job as a construction worker in Tokyo. Their apartment is just two rooms and a kitchen, but the rent is covered. Okada wants to work, but publicly funded child-care is scarce in Japan, and private ones are costly.
“Nothing has progressed in five years,” she said. “We have the right to stay evacuated.”
Okada says she wants to apply for U.N. refugee status and move to Europe with her family, if she could.
“I know Japanese can’t become refugees now. But I wish we could,” she said. “It is about our staying alive.”
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Government evacuation map for Fukushima September 2011: http://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/roadmap/pdf/evacuation_map_111125.pdf
Government evacuation map for Fukushima September 2015:
http://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/roadmap/pdf/150905MapOfAreas.pdf
Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima
There is no simple or easy way to clean up an aftermath of a nuclear accident. Indeed, this report shows that there is no such thing in reality as a complete decontamination of radioactively contaminated areas. The disasters that began at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in 1986 and at Fukushima NPP in 2011 have demonstrated not only the terrible initial consequences of major nuclear accidents; they also left us with long-term consequences for human health and the environment. These scars are still with us today and will be with us long after tomorrow.
The nuclear industry likes to frame these accidents in terms of downplayed numbers of deaths, but the reality is far more complex and insidious. The impacts go far beyond the tens of thousands of fatalities and hundreds of thousands suffering health consequences. Following a nuclear disaster, people are put under overwhelming pressures. They must evacuate their communities to avoid radiation risks. They are displaced from their friends, families and communities for years.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the nuclear industry and its government supporters continue to hide the threats of nuclear power from the public. The real risk of nuclear power, however, is inescapable for hundreds of thousands of Chernobyl and Fukushima survivors. Despite the immense suffering that accompanies losing your home or living in a contaminated environment, the scale and seriousness of these effects continue to be played down or misrepresented.
This report seeks to clarify how governments, reactor operators and nuclear regulators were unprepared to deal with not only emergency evacuations immediately after the accidents, but with the long-term management of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as with the contaminated communities and agricultural lands.
Nuclear scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima
Court issues surprise injunction to halt Takahama nuclear
OTSU, SHIGA PREF. – In a surprise ruling that is likely to delay efforts to restart nuclear power generation nationwide, the Otsu District Court on Wednesday issued a provisional injunction ordering Kansai Electric Power Co. to shut down its No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at its Takahama facility in Fukui Prefecture.
While Kepco is expected to appeal the ruling, company officials said at a news conference that was hastily called after the decision that they would begin operations to shut down the No. 3 reactor on Thursday morning, and expected to complete the process by the evening.
The No. 3 reactor was restarted in January, and the No. 4, which had been scheduled to restart last month, was delayed due to technical problems.
“There are doubts remaining about both the tsunami response and the evacuation plan,” the ruling said.
The Otsu ruling comes just two days before the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami and triple meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 plant.
The jubilant plaintiffs expressed surprise and relief following the ruling, which emphasized technical problems regarding the two reactors, including issues concerning an outside power supply source in the event of an emergency. The ruling also raised concerns over the emergency protocol.
“This is a huge victory for the safety of children, people with disabilities, and the society and economy of not only the Fukui-Kansai region of Japan but the entire country,” said Aileen Mioko Smith of Kyoto-based Green Action, an anti-nuclear group. Smith was not a plaintiff in the case.
The lawsuit that sought the injunction was filed by Shiga residents who are fearful that an accident at the Takahama plant, which lies less than 30 kilometers from the northern part of Shiga Prefecture, would impact Lake Biwa, the nation’s largest freshwater body and the source of water for about 14 million people in the Kansai region, including Kyoto and Osaka.
The judgment — the first of its kind affecting reactors that were fired up under strengthened safety regulations following the March 2011 disaster — is a blow to the government’s renewed push for atomic power. The ruling could also cast doubt on the stringency of the new safety regulations.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, however, told reporters following the ruling the government would not change its basic stance of promoting restarts.
In a separate case concerning the two reactors, the Fukui District Court issued an injunction last April banning Kansai Electric from restarting the units, citing safety concerns.
But the same court later lifted the injunction in December, allowing the utility to resume operations at both reactors. Plaintiffs appealed the court decision to the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court, where the case is pending.
Under the revamped safety regulations, which took effect in 2013, utilities are for the first time obliged to put in place specific countermeasures in the event of severe accidents such as reactor core meltdowns and huge tsunami — which was the initial cause of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Court orders Takahama reactor shut down, 2nd offline
A court has issued an unprecedented order for a nuclear reactor in western Japan to stop operating and ordered a second one to stay offline.
The Otsu District Court in Shiga Prefecture, which issued the injunction, said the emergency response plans and equipment designs at the two reactors have not been sufficiently upgraded despite the 2011 Fukushima crisis.
Wednesday’s order requires Kansai Electric Power Co. to shut down the No. 3 reactor immediately and keep the No. 4 offline at the Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture, home to about a dozen reactors.
The two reactors restarted this year after a high court in December reversed an earlier injunction by another court.
The decision reflects Japan’s divisive views on nuclear safety and leaves only two of the country’s 43 reactors in operation.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201603090064
FIVE YEARS AFTER: Radioactive forests prevent logging revival in Fukushima
A logger cuts down a tree in a mountainous area of the Miyakoji district in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, in late February
TAMURA, Fukushima Prefecture–The once-thriving industry of log production for shiitake mushroom farming remains virtually nonexistent in Fukushima Prefecture after the 2011 nuclear disaster contaminated extensive mountain areas.
A year before the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, the prefecture produced logs for cultivating shiitake totaling 47,800 cubic meters, the third largest volume among Japanese prefectures.
But radioactive fallout from the nuclear accident meant that shiitake log production in the prefecture dwindled to about 1 percent of the pre-disaster level in 2014, which is having a serious impact on local industry.
In the Miyakoji district of Tamura, located about 20 kilometers inland from the crippled nuclear power plant, the lumber industry shipped around 200,000 logs annually before the 2011 disaster.
“More than 80 percent of this area’s land is covered by forests, and we cannot think of any other business opportunities that don’t involve forestry,” said Shoichi Yoshida, a 60-year-old executive of the Fukushima Central Forestry Association.
While the evacuation order covering an eastern strip of the district was lifted in 2014, radioactive levels of trees in the district remain above target levels, and the resumption of shipments is still nowhere in sight.
However, local forestry workers still routinely cut down oak and other trees, which are more than 20 years old, to maintain the mountain area’s capability of producing quality logs.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/recovery/AJ201603090060
Five Years of Forgetting: The Fukushima Disaster and Nuclear Amnesia
Shunichi Yamashita, a proclaimed expert on the effects of radioactivity, was invited by the #Fukushima prefecture in the aftermath of the meltdowns to reassure rather than investigate.
“The effects of radiation,”he claimed, “do not come to people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-minded.”
“People’s understanding of disasters will continue to be constructed by media. How media members frame the presence of risk and the nature of disasters matters.” – Celine Marie Pascale, American University, Mar 10, 2015
Fearing radiation; terrified by the nuclear option. Perfectly sensible instincts that never seem to convince establishments and those who have long ceased to loathe nuclear power and its various dangerous by-products. Each nuclear disaster, such as the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plants five years ago, come with its treasure of apologetics and justifications. The reason is always the same: nuclear energy is safe and we cannot really do without it.
To that end, the emergence of “radiophobia” is a designation that dismisses as much as it supposedly diagnoses. It pokes fun at those ninnies who think that they are about to perish because of the effects of nuclear catastrophe and radiation contamination. Risk, according to this philosophy of concerted denial, is always exaggerated.
Shunichi Yamashita, a proclaimed expert on the effects of radioactivity, was invited by the Fukushima prefecture in the aftermath of the meltdown to reassure rather than investigate.
“The effects of radiation,” he claimed, “do not come to people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-minded.”
This Dr. Strangelove dismissiveness is as much an advertisement for the virtues of doom as it is about the brutal consequences, real and imaginary, of radiation poisoning. Radiation is the invisible killer that stalks the earth, but for many, it is hardly worth a thought. For one, it suggests a simple calculation in environments that are not, supposedly, that dangerous. “With low radiation doses,” argued this doctor of nuclear apologetics, “the people have to decide for themselves whether to stay or to leave.”
Despite this bubbling confidence on the part of his colleagues, Japanese American physicist Michio Kaku had little time for such views as Yamashita’s. In an interview soon after the meltdown, Kaku claimed that, “The slightest disturbance could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.”
Smile with upbeat confidence, and the problem goes away. If people are depressed before radiation, suggests Yamashita, they will succumb as the negative dramatists they are. “Stress is not good at all for people who are subjected to radiation.” Then again, stress could hardly be deemed good for anybody in particular, irrespective of radiation.
Security checkpoint outside Fukushima following the disaster.
Such fabulously misguided nonsense is central to the amnesiac context of Fukushima. Makiko Segawa put it rather poignantly in his contribution in the Asia-Pacific Journal: initial enthusiastic snaps and coverage by the press corps, an insatiable lust for disaster imagery, quietened in due course. Writing a year after the disaster, Segawa noted how “the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident of design Japan’s government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny.”
Robert Jacobs similar notes that Fukushima conforms to that litany of disasters that has afflicted the human experience, a matter of rejection and experience rather than learning and adapting. “Fukushima is taking its place alongside the many forgotten nuclear disasters of the last 70 years.”
Sociologist Celine Marie Pascale of the American University, on scouring some 2,100 news stories from four media outlets (The New York Times, Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Politico) came to the conclusion that a strategy of minimisation was underway. The implications of such an event had to be downplayed, de-emphasising the risk of massive contamination and environmental disaster. A mere 6 percent of the articles examined the health implications of the event. “We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.”
A necessary process of mendacity has to come into play. The Tokyo Electric Power Plant (TEPCO), Japan’s largest power company and owner of the affected power plants, initially denied the existence of meltdowns when it knew three had taken place. It was a process of deception that continued for three months after the event, a situation made even more absurd for the fact that hundreds of thousands were evacuated in the vicinity. It is a disaster episode that keeps on giving.
Even in March 2015, their reassurances seemed less than comforting. Chief Decommissioning Officer Naohiro Masuda would claim rather blandly that, “Even if some contaminated water remains, I feel that we can reduce a substantial amount of risk.”
The nuclear genie is a creature that encourages the lie in planning establishments. There are lies about safety; there are lies about legacies. As Jacobs suggests, the Disneyfication of disaster sites affected by the nuclear or atomic scourge is all too real. The Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki became “Disney theme parks of American exceptionalism.” The quest for the nuclear option in both the military and energy contexts saw massive environmental degradation.
Even now, the ghostly sense of Fukushima should be a reminder of errors and negligence rather than dismissal and indifference. Jacobs suggests a simple but necessary formula to combat nuclear amnesia: see the impacts of radiation exposure “before they become vaguely visible as cancers nestled in health population statistics.”
The Broken Maps of Fukushima
by Robert Jacobs, March 9, 2016
When we look at maps of Fukushima what we see is disinformation. The maps of the radioactive contamination of Fukushima contain contradictions that embody our inability to understand the true nature of the dangers to people living there. This is rooted in the difficulty in understanding radiation. If we can separate the maps, we may be able to grasp the dangers more readily, and thus understand the situation in a more functional way.
Similarly, one can hold a Geiger counter up in the air in a village in Fukushima prefecture and declare that there is no radiation present. The assumption, therefore, is that there is no danger. The ways in which this can be both true, but only partial truth, are part of what we need to fully grasp to understand the situation in Fukushima.
I will begin with the Geiger counter.
Radiation is a very difficult thing to understand. For starters, we tend to assume that radiation is a “thing.” Something is radioactive or it is not. We are affected by the radiation or we are not. This is not quite accurate. Radiation is a quality: it is a process—something radiates. How it radiates can differ, and it is in this difference that half-truths can be told as whole truths. While there are many aspects to this, for the present article I will concentrate on the differences between gamma, beta and alpha radiation. Most of the discourse that you hear about radiation related to Fukushima is describing gamma radiation. The danger to most of the people continuing to live in contaminated areas is in the form of alpha or beta radiation, so when we hear people talk about radiation in Fukushima, most of the time they are not talking about what is of most concern and danger.
Here is a quick primer. Gamma radiation comes off of radioactive materials in waves. These waves can penetrate anything, and they are partially filtered by heavy materials, such as lead. You can think of gamma radiation as similar to x-rays. This is why you have a lead apron placed on you when you have dental x-rays, and why the technician goes behind a lead-lined wall. When gamma radiation passes through your body it does not stay in your body. Like x-rays, when the source is turned off, they stop and there is no more danger. To limit the damage to the body from gamma radiation we limit the total cumulative dose received, hence the person working with it protects themselves behind the lead wall; the patient receives a small dose, but if the technicians received that same small dose repeatedly every day, they would be at much higher risk.
Alpha and beta radiation comes from specific irradiated particles, such as individual atoms of plutonium, or cesium-137. These particles cannot penetrate through materials: they cannot penetrate through skin, or even paper. They are primarily dangerous when we internalize them inside of our bodies and they permanently lodge there. They generally give off a small amount of radiation because they are single atoms. If there are a lot of them present, they give off more radiation. If one is internalized into the body, it will give this small amount of radiation to the same surrounding cells for 24 hours a day. While the amount is small, 24/7 exposure to this radiation may cause mutations to these cells, and then cancer.
Gamma radiation fills an area equally, lessening quickly as you get further from the source. This is what most Geiger counters are set to measure—the levels of gamma radiation present. When you have alpha and beta-emitting particles scattered in an area, the amount of detectable radiation will likely vary. In Fukushima City last year (about 50 miles away from the nuclear plants), I held a Geiger counter at chest level on a street and found a low level of radiation. However, moments later when I placed that same Geiger counter on the ground, I found much higher levels of radiation. That is because particles fall and collect on the ground. When I then moved my Geiger counter to the gutter at the side of the street, I found dramatically more radiation. This is because rain washes the particles to the gutter. So the distribution of the particles is irregular, depending on how long ago they fell-out of the sky (fallout) and how much wind and rain there has been.
This is how you can hold a Geiger counter in the air (or place a public Geiger counter five or twenty feet in the air) and show very low levels of radiation, and yet there can still be significant dangers present. If the danger is from alpha and beta-emitting particles, the readings taken in mid-air can be low. The way that such particles are dangerous to us is if we internalize them into our bodies, typically by inhaling them, swallowing them, of having them enter through cuts in our skin. Once inside the body, they may pass through, but they may also permanently lodge there. The body is tricked into thinking that these particles are useful chemicals. Strontium-90 “mimics” calcium, and the body can put it into the bones. Since the body puts iodine into the thyroid gland, if someone has internalized iodine-131 (a radioactive form of iodine) the body may put that in the thyroid gland. Thyroid cancer is one of the first cancers to develop from internalized particles, and that is why our conversation about the health impacts in Fukushima are currently focused on thyroid cancer. Other cancers will follow as we move through their latency periods.
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Table 1
Some isotopes of concern after a nuclear accident:
Plutonium 239, half-life: 24,000 years, decay mode: alpha, decay energy: 5.24 MeV
Strontium 90, half-life: 29 years, decay mode: beta, decay energy: 0.546 MeV
Cesium 134, half-life: 2 years, decay mode: beta, gamma, decay energy: 0.698 MeV
Cesium 137, half-life: 34 years, decay mode: beta, gamma, decay energy: 1.76 MeV
Iodine 131, half-life: 8 days, decay mode: beta, gamma, decay energy: 971 keV
Tritium, half-life: 12 years, decay mode: beta, decay energy: 18.6 keV
Decay energy is measured in electron volts (eV), a measure of the particle’s momentum. 1 MeV is 1,000,000 eV, and 1 keV is 1,000 eV. According to the table, Plutonium 239 is the most dangerous internal emitter, but the hazards to public health depend on the relative quantities released and the relative quantities that people actually absorb. Some segments of the population are more vulnerable than others. Is it a matter of a single exposure or a continual exposure and accumulation? What parts of the body do different particles tend to go to, and how long on average do they tend to stay in the body (the biological half-life)? None of this complexity can be conveyed with a map and a simple declaration of a “safe” limit of external gamma radiation exposure. （Table added by Dianuke editor)
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These alpha and beta-emitters are particularly dangerous for children. Children are lower to the ground to start with, tend to put things into their mouths, and tend to play outdoors and suffer cuts and bruises, and since their bodies are growing rapidly, damage to cells can replicate faster. This is why parents agonize over whether to stay or evacuate an area that has had radiological fallout.
This is also why it is hard to be certain about the contamination to the food supply. It is virtually impossible to test all food, and so samples are tested: samples of rice from rice fields, samples of fish from catches, samples of fruit from orchards. Because the danger to these crops is not from gamma radiation, which would be equally distributed, but from their internalizing alpha and beta-emitting particles, portions of a crop, or haul of fish, can test negative while other portions contain significant amounts of radiation deposited on them or taken up through soil and water into the plant or fish itself.
Our ability to technologically determine the distribution of alpha and beta-emitting particles is limited because of the irregular deposit of the material from fallout clouds, and the subsequent scattering of the particles from wind and water. This is also why it is possible to “decontaminate” an area only to have it re-contaminated as the wind and rain redistribute the particles that fell on nearby forests. Technically it is not possible to “decontaminate” a natural area. The radioactive particles will remain dangerous for their natural life. For plutonium that is over 100,000 years. During that time, it cannot be decontaminated, it can only be moved. We can attempt to contain these particles, however most of them will long outlive the plastic bags into which we placed them, at which time they will re-enter the soil and the ecosystem and begin to cycle through it again.
Understanding the difference between the dangers from gamma, beta and alpha radiation is the key to understanding how the maps of Fukushima are broken. Below is a typical map that we see of Fukushima, produced by the Japanese government:
Map of Fukushima produced by MEXT of the Government of Japan and reproduced on the website of the IAEA.
There are two things that I want to point out. First, the concentric circles. These have the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant at their center. The second thing is the color coded splotches and streak. These show where the plumes of the three nuclear plant explosions deposited their fallout, in this case specifically measurements of cesium-134 and cesium-137. Notice how the representation of the areas of fallout are constrained by the outermost concentric circle.
These two things should be read separately.
Concentric circles describe relative distances from a point. In this case, distances from the nuclear plant. People were evacuated based on their distance from the plant. The mandatory evacuation zone was at 20 km and the suggested, or prepared evacuation zone was from 20-30 km (the key difference between “mandatory” and “suggested” evacuation is liability). The reason that people had to evacuate from these areas was because of the high levels of gamma radiation coming from the melted cores of the nuclear plants, and the high levels of gamma radiation where the plumes deposited the largest amounts of fallout close-by. The levels of gamma radiation near the reactors is lethally high. At this point, no human being can enter into the buildings where the nuclear cores melted. The gamma radiation levels are so high that they would be killed in minutes. We have yet to build robots capable of operating in these highly radioactive locations for longer than an hour or so. Moving away from the point at the center of these circles will decrease one’s exposure to radiation. The amount of gamma radiation coming from the plant is measurable and relatively constant across the areas at similar distances. Hence the use of circles, concentric circles marking decreasing levels of gamma radiation.
Here is a map of the evacuations:
Concentric Circles Showing Areas of Evacuation, No-Fly Zone, and U.S. Safety Zone Around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plants, and the Populations of Nearby Towns.
When we look, instead, at a map of the radiological contamination of the downwind area, we are reading entirely different information. The splotches of color marking the levels of radiation from the plumes is irregular, unlike the neat and cleanly measured concentric circles. The colors mark the different grades of radiation from the fallout. They are created based on the gamma radiation from the fallout, however, the primary danger to people living in these areas is not based on the levels of the gamma radiation, but from internalizing individual alpha and beta-emitting particles. Since there is no single source, like the melted cores, but rather billions of individual particles, once the plume has fallen out and the particles have reached the ground, they begin to move through the ecosystem via the dynamic motion of wind and water, and then they are internalized in the bodies of animals. Rain will collect them along gutters and gullies and transport them. Wind will blow them along hillsides and valleys. Once these particles begin to move through the ecosystem, there is no center, no specific source that people must move away from. The dangers are unevenly distributed, and they are constantly changing. Once you are over 30 km away from the nuclear plants, surrounded by their concentric circles, moving further away from the direction of the plants may or may not provide more safety. The contamination that comes from alpha and beta-emitting particles is unpredictable, irregular, and changes over time. Each specific particle has a specific period of radioactivity and during that period, it will move through the ecosystem, being taken up by plants, moved by wind, entering soil, eaten by animals and returning to the soil when the animals die. They may move in the same direction that you are moving to get away from the center of the concentric circles, if the wind is blowing that way.
Here is a map showing the radiological contamination of the region, which differs from the specific places where the plumes first deposited:
Map of Radiation Levels Downwind from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plants in 2014, Produced by the Nuclear Regulation Authority of the Government of Japan.
The maps of Fukushima are broken. These broken maps are reflections of the broken chain of information that has been provided to those living there and grappling with the dangers on a daily basis. Because these maps, and this information, are broken, disinformation can thrive and blossom. A March 7th editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan makes use of these broken maps and the data that they convey to misinform people in Japan about the safety of former residents moving back into contaminated areas. With no sense of irony, it’s headline proclaims, “Correct Understanding of Radiation Needed to Speed Reconstruction.” Explaining that exposure to radiation is natural, the editorial claims that, “The government needs to continue carefully explaining to residents that there will be no health problems as long as the radiation exposure is at 20 millisieverts or lower.” For this reason, people need “correct understanding” to cooperate and return to areas that can only be decontaminated to 20 millisieverts. While there is significant debate about what level of gamma radiation is safe, and increasingly convincing data that no level is safe (see here), this argument ignores the fact that much of that 20 millisievert exposure is coming from alpha and beta-emitting particles, which pose an additional danger from that of the external exposure. For the people being advised to return, the areas they would return to are plagued by the more urgent risk of internalizing these particles, a danger that increases dramatically in areas where the external exposure is still measurably high. Their lives would be filled with the presence of large amounts of invisible atoms that will very likely cause cancers if inhaled or swallowed. These dangers are not factored into the 20 millisieverts the editorial writers so casually dismiss.
These broken maps, co-mingling the dangers of external and internal radiation in one graphic, present the idea that the dangers from radiation near Fukushima are fixed and knowable. This is not true. Massive amounts of radionuclides have deposited along large areas of Fukushima, and they will now pulse and fluctuate within the dynamics of that ecosystem for as long as each particle remains radioactive. Most of them will be hard to trace and difficult to control. People can be moved away from the plants, where the danger is in a fixed location and is measurable. Where the plumes deposited the particles the opposite is true. The dangers are unknowable and can move around, just like the people. This puts the health of those living there in a very different relationship to the risks.
To fix the maps, we need to fix the knowledge chain. Radiation is difficult to understand, and that difficulty allows disinformation to take root–disinformation like that contained in the editorial of the Yomiuri cited above, and in so many pronouncements from experts who omit information about alpha and beta-emitting particles and the dangers of internalized radiation when they speak down to people who must live with these dangers. For most people having to live with the radiation scattered by TEPCO’s meltdowns, clear information about internalized radiation and how these dangers persist in their communities is essential for them to map their own paths to a future of their choosing. No one should insist that they live with higher levels of radiation by changing their understanding to the “correct understanding.”
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Robert Jacobs is a historian of nuclear technologies and radiation technopolitics at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University.
Dentist urges people to keep kids’ baby teeth to study Fukushima radiation exposure
A movement calling on people to retain their children’s baby teeth to help study radiation exposure in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is gaining momentum in Japan.
The radioactive material strontium-90 is easily absorbed into baby teeth, and last year a group of experts formed the “Preserving Deciduous Teeth Network (PDTN),” urging people to keep their children’s baby teeth.
“Baby teeth are evidence of exposure to radiation. We urge people to keep them for the future,” says Takemasa Fujino, 67, a joint head of the network.
Fujino is president of a medical institution that operates three dental clinics in the Tokyo metropolitan region. One clinic is in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, which was regarded as a “hot spot” with relatively high levels of radiation following the March 2011 outbreak of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster.
With residents feeling uneasy, in 2011 Fujino began calling for people to preserve their children’s baby teeth, wanting to do something as a dentist to protect children’s lives and health.
So far, Fujino has had about 500 baby teeth donated, and has commissioned a Swiss testing facility to analyze some of them. Next year the network plans to establish its own testing facility in central Japan.
Baby teeth are formed from when the child is in the womb. “The teeth of children that were fetuses five years ago at the time of the accident will be coming at about this point exactly, and the movement to preserve them will become even more important,” Fujino says.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160307/p2a/00m/0na/015000c
5 years after disaster, reactor decommissioning faces troubling shortage of workers
Workers are seen undertaking construction work on the premises of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on May 7, 2015
A total of 21 companies involved with the decommissioning of reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant — half of the firms that responded to a survey conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun — revealed that they are facing concerns due to an insufficient number of employees for the work.
The risk of radiation exposure from the decommissioning work means that the companies are having trouble attracting young people, with the ongoing aging of the population pointing toward a possible hollowing-out with respect to the technical abilities of the workforce in this regard. This could mean that the problem of securing workers will become an ongoing problem that would result in a delay of reactor decommissioning — which could in turn hinder local reconstruction efforts.
At the administrative building located at the nuclear plant’s point of entrance and exit, workers are routinely met with a greeting of “Please be safe” as they come and go in order to encourage them to fulfill their tasks without any incidents occurring.
While the plant was known immediately after the nuclear accident as a disaster zone, now — five years later — a sense of calm has been restored. The radiation exposure risks and the aging of employees, however, have meant that problems continue to plague the workplace environment.
The survey was sent to a total of 246 companies connected to the reactor decommissioning work, including prime contractors, as well as additional firms whose names were included in construction work-related approval and licensing documents that were submitted to Fukushima Prefecture and other local government offices. Responses were received from 42 companies, or around 20 percent of the total number contacted.
Asked whether they had a sufficient number of employees, 21 firms responded either “No, we have an insufficient number of employees,” or “Basically speaking, we have an insufficient number of employees” — a figure eclipsing the 20 firms that responded, “We have a sufficient number of employees,” or “Basically speaking, we have a sufficient number of employees.”
Asked to name the reasons for the insufficiency (with multiple responses allowed), the answer with the highest number of responses was “Numerous employees are leaving the company due to retirement, and young people are not coming (to take their place),” at 10 firms. The second- and third-highest answers, respectively, were “it’s difficult to pass down the (required) technical skills,” at seven firms; and “the number of aspiring employees is decreasing due to the high radiation levels,” at six firms.
“Although people respond when we announce job openings, they do not have the necessary qualifications — such as being able to hoist and lower suspended loads,” commented the 52-year-old president of a construction firm in the Fukushima prefectural city of Iwaki that is contracted by the nuclear plant for reactor decommissioning-related work.
The firm in question is mostly contracted for on-site work where radiation levels are high. When the government-set figures of 50 millisieverts per year and 100 millisieverts per every five years are exceeded, on-site work is not permitted — and the company must therefore compensate by hiring extra employees.
Because qualified individuals are not available, however, the firm contracts with another company — resulting in a situation whereby its labor insufficiency is filled by hiring the other firm’s employees as its own. This practice, which is known as fake subcontracting, runs the risk of infringing the Worker Dispatch Law and other regulations.
“We are aware that this is illegal,” the company president notes, “but everyone still does it.”
According to a worker survey conducted by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, some 20 percent of all workers at the plant had been hired via fake subcontracting. And while TEPCO asks its business affiliates to comply with the law, it does not appear that this is a situation that is set to improve.
“With reactor decommissioning set to be entering its most crucial stage, the national government should be taking the initiative to put measures in place that are aimed at securing workers for this purpose,” points out Kazumitsu Nawata, a professor of econometrics at the University of Tokyo who is well-versed in the situation facing the nuclear plant workers.
In assessing the future prospects for the reactor decommissioning work, which is likely to go on for several decades, a matter exists beyond that of securing new laborers that is an additional cause for concern: the problem of workers’ exposure to radiation.
The estimated average monthly radiation exposure of workers was 32 millisieverts immediately following the nuclear accident, and has presently decreased to 0.44 millisieverts. No longer is there a need to wear full-face masks, which made breathing difficult.
Between the disaster and January 2016, however, the number of workers whose yearly radiation exposure level was greater than 5 millisieverts — a figure that the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare utilizes as a criteria when determining the recognition of workers’ compensation in cases of leukemia — was around 20,000 among the total of 42,000 workers.
When irradiated fuel from the spent nuclear fuel pools begins to be transported, moreover, there is a possibility that the dosage in this regard will increase even further.
A 23-year-old male worker from the city of Iwaki who was responsible for removing radioactively-contaminated vehicles that had been left on the premises of the nuclear plant said that he was surprised when the figures on his dosimeter began increasing immediately.
“I do not know what effects (this work) will have upon my body in 30 years,” he commented. “I do not want to do work involving high doses (of radiation).”
Also troubling are the effects of the withdrawal of seasoned workers from the field. According to TEPCO, veteran employees in their 50s or older comprise 45 percent of all total workers. With reactor decommissioning work — including the collection of melted nuclear fuel — expected to enter its main phase in 2021, it is possible that the continuing loss of experienced workers will lead to a situation characterized by a reduction in both human resources and technology.
“I will never again return to 1F (the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant),” asserted Yuji Takagi, 53, a former nuclear plant worker from the city of Iwaki.
Takagi, a veteran employee since the time prior to the nuclear disaster whose work included helping to measure the number of neutrons directly underneath the nuclear reactors, explained that with the sudden increase in the number of tank and other construction projects taking place following the accident, there was also a rising number of employees who were inexperienced with working at nuclear power plants.
As a result, Takagi felt like there was a mismatch wherein he was unable to utilize his job experience.
“If you do not understand the inner structure of nuclear plants, there will be problems with reactor decommissioning,” he commented, adding, “Know-how is indispensable.”
The system is comprised of a pyramid-like structure, whereby TEPCO and major general contractors — which serve as the original contractors at its peak — contract out work to the other companies that are fanned out beneath them. With work consequently compartmentalized, then, it accordingly becomes increasingly difficult to utilize employees’ expertise.
“The structure of subcontracting results in decreasing profits for lower-level companies, who are additionally burdened with taking up the slack (of companies further up on the pyramid),” commented Professor Nawata. “A mechanism is necessary to improve this treatment.”
Also involved with the reactor decommissioning work are numerous local residents of Fukushima Prefecture who are themselves victims of the disaster.
A 51-year-old worker from Futaba County who is responsible for analyzing contaminated water at TEPCO-owned facilities on the premises of the plant commented, “My work plays only a small part, but analysis of the contaminated water is an indispensable part of the reactor decommissioning process.”
The worker added, “I am happy to be of service to Fukushima Prefecture, as well as to the next generation.”
The feared scarcity of workers, then, has also resulted in a situation of dependence upon Fukushima workers to fill this employment need that exists within the reactor decommissioning sector.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160307/p2a/00m/0na/020000c
1 This Month
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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