Beyond Nuclear International

A teenager’s account of the Fukushima ordeal

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Ten years after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, how has the Japanese government responded and what is it like for the people affected, still struggling to return their lives to some semblance of normality? Here is how things look:

• Manuals are being distributed in schools explaining that radioactivity exists in nature and is therefore not something to be afraid of.

• The government is considering getting rid of radiation monitoring posts as these send the wrong message at a time of “reconstruction”.

• The Oversight Committee for Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey is discussing the possibility of stopping thyroid inspections at schools because they stress children out and overburden teachers and staff.

• Depression and suicide rates among young people from Fukushima are likely to be triggered by being called “germs” and by being seen as “contaminated”.

• Those who speak out about radiation are more stigmatized today than they were 10 years ago.

• Those who “voluntarily” evacuated, recognizing that the so-called protection standards were not adequate for their region, are often ostracized from their new communities. They are seen as selfish for abandoning their homeland, friends and families “just to save themselves” and are bullied as parasites living on compensation funds, even though the “auto-evacuees” as they are known, received none.

• Those forced to evacuate are also bullied if they do not now return, accused of not trusting the government and its assertions that it is safe to do so.

• The taboo against speaking out for proper radiation protection and for compensation has grown worse as the rescheduled Olympics loom for this summer and Japan is determined to prove to the world it has fixed the radiation problem and beaten Covid-19.

• On March 1, 2021, it took three judges all of 30 seconds to dismiss a case brought by 160 parents and children who lived in Fukushima prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident, and known as the Children’s Trial Against Radiation Exposure. The class action suit sought 100,000 yen per person in damages from the government and the prefecture, due to the psychological stress brought on by the lack of measures to avoid radiation exposure after the accident.

Film documents long campaign to get Vermont Yankee shut down

Power Struggle is available for at home screening for a limited time, March 1-30. A portion of the $12 ticket price benefits Beyond Nuclear. Purchase your ticket here.

By Linda Pentz Gunter

“Our voice as the people of Vermont is what matters,” says Vermont activist, Chad Simmons, early in Robbie Leppzer’s film, Power Struggle. Later, he entreats an official from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a public meeting: “Listen to us! Listen to us”.

By the time the film ends, as the struggle to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant —which Leppzer follows for five years — unfolds, Simmons can rejoinder: “People power works.” For once, the saga of an anti-nuclear campaign has a happy ending.

Vermont Yankee, a GE Mark I boiling water reactor identical to those that melted down at Fukushima Daiichi, opened in 1972 in Vernon, Vermont, close to the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders. Citizen protests began immediately, and went on until the plant finally closed, on December 29, 2014.

Leppzer may have set out to tell that story, but a lot more transpired during filming, both complicating but also validating the narrative. A story ostensibly about the power of protest — by the people of Vermont and its enlightened state government — quickly broadened into a condemnation of the nuclear industry as a whole. This is borne witness to at the start of the film through the observations of nuclear engineer and whistleblower, Arnie Gundersen, when Leppzer’s original narrative is abruptly interrupted by the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The rebirth of the Golden Rule

From LABRATS

March 1 is Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, the 67th commemoration of the 1954 US Castle Bravo test, the largest nuclear explosion, which had disastrous consequences for the people of the Marshall Islands and beyond.

The Golden Rule is a project of Veterans For Peace. They aim to advance Veterans For Peace opposition to nuclear weapons and war, and to do so in a dramatic fashion. They have recovered and restored the original peace ship, the Golden Rule, that set sail in 1958 to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere, and which inspired the many peace makers and peace ships that followed.

The reborn Golden Rule is sailing once more, to show that nuclear abolition is possible, and that bravery and tenacity can overcome militarism.

The Golden Rule was the very first of the environmental and peace vessels to go to sea. In 1958, a crew of anti-nuclear weapons activists set sail aboard her in an attempt to interpose themselves and the boat between the U.S. Government and its atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

At that time both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were conducting aboveground tests of very large nuclear weapons, which produced readily detectable clouds of radioactive fallout that wafted around the planet. Radiation contamination began to turn up in cows’ and mothers’ milk. Public concern grew, and for the first time many middle-class Americans began to wonder if their government knew what it was doing.

In 1958, the Golden Rule sailed from San Pedro, California toward the U.S. nuclear test zone at Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, but she never made it that far. The first time out of San Pedro Capt. Albert Bigelow, George Willoughby, William Huntington and David Gale were aboard. A week into the voyage the starboard jaw of the gaff broke.

The repair was done, but a gale, the worst in twenty years, quickly followed. As the crew reported, “David Gale was gravely ill. It was several days since he had even tried to eat or drink and we had given up trying to tell him to do so.” Twice the Coast Guard offered help and could have taken him to shore. Ultimately, Bigelow made the decision to turn back, knowing that the effort to stop the atomic tests might be sacrificed. They made it back to San Pedro two weeks after starting.

Impeachment hero Jamie Raskin lives here, but Takoma Park has long been famous

By Linda Pentz Gunter

I’ll admit that I have an ambivalent relationship with granola. Perhaps that is because my first introduction to it was muesli, which is basically chopped cardboard. My husband routinely buys granola, which languishes on larder shelves and eventually is tossed (by me) to grateful birds and squirrels. Let’s just say it’s not my breakfast of champions.

But if eating granola makes us the good guys then, well, bring it on! 

Takoma Park, Maryland, where Beyond Nuclear is headquartered, is frequently described — or, more accurately, mocked — in the press as “Granola Park”. (Sister organization, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, is also based in Takoma Park.)

Our left-leaning Takoma Park citizenry are aging, “crunchy” hippies (in reality only 11% of Takoma Park residents are over 65). And eccentrics. 

Okay, this latter is admittedly hard to refute. We had a resident roving rooster now immortalized in bronze downtown; a cat who rode with its owner on a motorbike, replete with its own leather helmet; an animal rights activist who carried a dead fox in a trap around town to make his point; and of course our very own blind, peace-sign carrying Peace Delegate.

The Utne Reader once admiringly anointed Takoma Park as “the leftiest ‘burb in America” (take that Berkeley!) Early on, “The People’s Republic of Takoma Park”, as we are also known, had a socialist mayor. Three of President Obama’s top advisors lived here, two of whom biked to the White House.

Indeed, Granola Park is a welcome hotbed of “good guys” — just over 17,000 of us in all. These include citizens and non-citizens, old and young, men and women, black, white and brown, straight, gay and trans, and state as well as national politicians.