Beyond Nuclear International
Rudolph the radioactive reindeer
Dosed by Chernobyl and atomic tests, reindeer and their herders are carrying a heavy nuclear burden
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Fallout from Soviet atomic bomb tests over the Arctic Ocean, compounded by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, have left reindeer too radioactive to eat, even today. That may be good news for the reindeer, sort of. But it’s bad news for the indigenous Laplanders in Finland and Sami herders in Norway, who carry high levels of radiation in their own bodies as well as in the reindeer on which they depend for sustenance and sales.
Reindeer carry heavy radioactive doses, mainly of cesium-137, because they devour lichen, moss and fungi, which bioaccumulate radioactive deposits from fallout. Norway’s radioactive contamination is primarily from Chernobyl, made worse because it was snowing heavily at the time of the April 26 accident.
A Sami herder feeds his reindeer. (Photo: Suwipat Lorsiripaiboon, Shutterstock)
The Sami story is beautifully explained in this stunning photo essay by Amos Chapple and Wojtek Grojec for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Crushing children instead of climate change
Young people suing US government over climate change are staying the course
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“As California burns, Trump administration battles climate lawsuit.”
That’s the headline that recently ran across the website of Our Children’s Trust. It refers to a lawsuit brought in 2015 by 21 children, now aged between 10 and 21, first against the Obama administration and now the Trump administration. The children’s claim? That “through the government’s affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources.”
Trump may want to rake while California burns, but his administration is also using every legal avenue possible to stamp out the fire of these determined young people fighting for their future.
In effect, the government is using its battery of lawyers to play the game of delay. But, just like climate change, which won’t go away if we simply delay dealing with it, these children remain determined not to go away either. The stakes are simply too high.
Those stakes are best articulated by the young people themselves. Here is Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, then 15 and now 18, and one of the plaintiffs in the suit on behalf of Earth Guardians, of which he is now Youth Director, and who has been speaking out for the climate and our environment since he was six years old.
Asterix and nuclear power
How bootlegged versions of the legendary comic books conscripted the little Gaul into the anti-nuclear movement
By Linda Pentz Gunter
It was an audacious piece of bootlegging that began in Austria and then spread like wildfire across Europe. Someone in the Austrian anti-nuclear movement decided to recreate the much beloved Asterix character in an anti-nuclear tale. Through cut-and-paste, an all new Asterix book was born — Asterix und das Atomkraftwerk (Asterix and nuclear power). It was created to coincide with the ultimately successful campaign against the proposed Zwentendorf nuclear power plant in Austria.
For those of us who grew up in Europe, the Asterix books — about the little ancient Gaul and his stone-hauling sidekick, Obelix — were a childhood fixture. Full of whimsy and humor, they were written in French by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. The plots largely centered around Asterix and his fellow villagers defending themselves against the Romans. But they also ventured forth, including to ancient Britain, where Asterix mocks the national obsession with drinking tea by calling it “eau chaude”.
By 1978, when the first bootlegged anti-nuclear Asterix book appeared, Goscinny had died, but Uderzo filed numerous lawsuits and was eventually able to block distribution. Before then, however, the cut-and-paste idea had taken off, and numerous books had appeared, with at least 20 versions in German as well as in French, Dutch and in several Spanish dialects including Basque.
Asterix and Nuclear Power replicated the anti-Roman theme, this time with Julius Caesar planning to build a nuclear power plant in the village of Gauls inhabited by Asterix and his friends.
Fukushima evacuees forced back into unacceptably high radiation zones
One man is advocating for their protection
By Linda Pentz Gunter
A UN Special Rapporteur who last August joined two colleagues in sounding an urgent alarm about the plight of Fukushima workers, has now roundly criticized the Japanese government for returning citizens to the Fukushima region under exposure levels 20 times higher than considered “acceptable” under international standards.
He urged the Japanese government to “halt the ongoing relocation of evacuees who are children and women of reproductive age to areas of Fukushima where radiation levels remain higher than what was considered safe or healthy before the nuclear disaster seven years ago.”
Baskut Tuncak, (pictured at top) UN Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes, noted during a October 25, 2018 presentation at the UN in New York, as well at a press conference, that the Japan Government was compelling Fukushima evacuees to return to areas where “the level of acceptable exposure to radiation was raised from 1 to 20 mSv/yr, with potentially grave impacts on the rights of young children returning to or born in contaminated areas.”
Typical housing for evacuees. 20 m2 prefab cabins, evacuation site, Miharu, Fukushima, 46 km north west of Fukushima-Daichi Nuclear Power Plant. (Photo: Lis Fields.)
He described exposure to toxic substances in general as “a particularly vicious form of exploitation.”
Why the UK Labour Party — and everyone — should reject nuclear power
Don’t Nuke the Climate is at the COP talks in Poland. Back in the UK, the Labour Party needs to listen
By Linda Walker
How many times have you heard people say ‘I would much rather not have nuclear power but we need it to combat climate change’?
This claim has been made so many times by the nuclear industry and its supporters that many people now just accept it as the lesser of two evils.
But the development of new nuclear power plants is actually no part of the solution to tackling climate change, and is in fact a big part of the problem.
Nuclear power is not carbon-free; is prohibitively expensive; all projects overrun wildly on both time and budget; is a source of harmful waste which no one yet knows what to do with; provides a terrorist target; produces routine emissions which are harmful to health; power plants are vulnerable to the flooding which will come as sea levels rise, and have to close down in times of drought; Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown the widespread and long-term health and environmental impact of accidents; and even nuclear advocates have recently admitted the close links to nuclear weapons.
Atomic Dust
US atomic bomb and missile tests crowded them onto Ebeye. Now their former Marshall Islands paradise is “the Slum of the Pacific.”
Words and photos by Vlad Sokhin
Children lying on mattresses placed on the floor of a room in an overcrowded house. Often several families live in one home.
The tiny island of Ebeye in Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, has a total area of 0.36 square kilometres and is home to over 15,000 people, most of whom were moved there from nearby islands because of a US Army missile range-testing program that was launched in the late 1940s. Overcrowding, poverty, outbreaks of infectious diseases and a high level of unemployment has led some to refer to Ebeye as the ‘ghetto of the Pacific’. Until the 1940s, the island’s population was negligible. During the Second World War, Japan occupied the Marshall Islands and moved some 1,000 settlers there and when the US captured the islands in 1944, a new naval base and the movement of people from other parts of the Atoll rapidly augmented Ebeye’s population.
A boys stands on a rock in a rubbish dump and watches his friends play in the water. Although Ebeye’s residents make a lot of efforts to keep their island clean, due to the lack of regular collections, waste builds up at various dumps across the island.
In preparation for ‘Operation Crossroads’, an extensive missile testing programme that would eventually comprise 67 blasts, the US military decided to move all non-US personnel from around the Kwajalein Atoll onto Ebeye, which lies around five kilometres north of Kwajalein Island, the largest in the Atoll. On 1 March 1954, under the code name of ‘Castle Bravo’, the US military detonated a dry fuel hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, in the north of the island chain, which was to be the most powerful nuclear device ever exploded by the United States. Though the Bikini Islanders had been persuaded to relocate to a neighbouring island in 1946, where they had suffered shortages and malnutrition, members of other nearby communities on Rongelap island were not evacuated until 3 days after the blast, causing many to suffer the effects of radiation sickness and birth defects.
Keen to return to their ancestral lands, Bikini islanders were tentatively allowed to come back to their homes three years after ‘Castle Bravo’ but had to be moved again after many developed leukaemia and thyroid tumours.
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