Beyond Nuclear International
The Great Train Photo Robbery
Despite one newspaper’s effort, Japan can’t make its radioactive waste “disappear.”
From information provided by Kurumi Sugita, Jon Goman, and Fukushima 311 Voices.
After the disastrous events of the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown in Japan, France-based Kurumi Sugita, a retired Japanese social anthropologist, and her American partner, Jon Goman, started a website for the French citizens group, Nos Voisins Lontains, 311 (Our Far Away Neighbors 311.) At first published only in French, it is now also published in English and Japanese at Fukushima 311 Voices.
In a particularly revelatory article last October, the pair highlighted the extent to which efforts to “normalize” the devastating consequences of the nuclear disaster are pervasive in Japan.
Tomioka train station when it was still closed due to high radiation levels
They detailed how the Mainichi Shimbun ran a story about the reopening of a stretch of railway line that had been closed since the Fukushima accident. The photo that accompanied the piece showed a train in the background. But the foreground of the picture was dominated by row after row of black trash bags filled with radioactive waste. (Shown in headline photo at the top of the article.)
Stark health findings for Fukushima monkeys
A shocking update
March 16, 2018
In a documentary by NHK — Radioactive Forest — scientists reveal their shocking findings about the fate of wildlife around Fukushima. While the NHK commentary is highly conservative, the content of the film speaks for itself. Towards the end, we learn of a study by Dr. Manabu Fukumoto of Macaque moneys, begun in 2013. Fukumoto found that the bone marrows of monkeys living in the radioactively contaminated Fukushima zone are producing almost no blood cells. Instead, the bone marrow has turned almost entirely into white-looking fat.
At left, bone marrow of a macaque living in Fukushima zone. At right, normal macaque bone marrow. (Radioactive Forest, NHK.)
This phenomenon was directly correlated to higher levels of cesium in muscle. Fukumoto found a “disturbing” measurement of 13,000 becquerels per kilogram in monkey thigh muscle, extremely high. This has ominous implications for leukemias in monkeys — and later also humans — given the Macaque DNA is only separated from ours by 7%.
By Cindy Folkers
Seven years after the Fukushima, Japan nuclear disaster began, forcing evacuations of at least 160,000 people, research has uncovered significant health impacts affecting monkeys living in the area and exposed to the radiological contamination of their habitat.
Shin-ichi Hayama, a wild animal veterinarian, has been studying the Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), or snow monkey, since before the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Now, his research has shown that monkeys in Fukushima have significantly low white and red blood cell counts as well as a reduced growth rate for body weight and smaller head sizes.
Hayama, who began his macaque research in 2008, had access to monkeys culled by Fukushima City as a crop protection measure. He continued his work after the Fukushima nuclear explosions. As a result, he is uniquely positioned to discover how low, chronic radiation exposure can affect generations of monkeys.
Japanese Macaque monkeys share close DNA with humans
The macaque is an old world monkey native to Japan, living in the coldest climates of all of the non-human primates. Like humans, macaques enjoy a good soak in the mountain hot springs in the region. It is even said that they have developed a “hot tub culture” and enjoy time at the pools to get warm during winter.
Firefighters’ remorse
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Remorse (Munen in Japanese) is a short animated film directed by Hidenobu Fukumoto (whose pen name is Ikumasa Teppei), an illustrator from Hiroshima Prefecture. It tells the story of volunteer firefighters and the townspeople of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture during the time of the triple March 11, 2011 disasters when an earthquake and tsunami were followed by explosions and then meltdowns at the 4-unit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
When the earthquake and tsunami struck, the firefighters at first went about their traditional task of search and rescue. But these efforts were tragically curtailed by the dangerous levels of radiation released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Once they too had to evacuate, those trapped by the earthquake and tsunami in areas of high radiation had to be abandoned.
“Remorse” shows how many firefighters continue to feel haunted by “the feelings of the people who died under the debris believing that help would arrive.”
The film also brings home how nuclear power, in the time of a crisis, simply adds to the danger and impedes rescue.
Japanese Mother Speaks Out
Warns that Fukushima nuclear disaster is far from over
By Linda Pentz Gunter (with special thanks to Kurumi Sugita)
Yoko Shimozawa is a young Japanese mother who evacuated from Tokyo three years after the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, due to concerns for her young daughter’s health.
Despite a massive campaign of information suppression in Japan, Ms. Shimozawa decided to take to the streets to sound the warning against efforts to downplay and effectively “normalize” radiation exposure in Japan. The text below is an excerpt in English of what she had to say. The video of her speech is viewable on Facebook — she begins speaking in English 38 seconds in.
“I am standing here to tell you that the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe is not over.
Documenting the Fukushima aftermath
When British visual artist Lis Fields, (pictured above) participated in a study tour of Fukushima, in October 2016, she didn’t simply take photos. She documented stories, talked to evacuees, scientists and others, and built a presentation that goes beyond the visual experience. She called it “20 millisieverts per year.”
Fields’ visit to Japan was under the auspices of Green Cross Switzerland, the international environmental NGO founded by Mikhail Gorbachev who, ironically, was president of the Soviet Union at the time of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine.
The ‘20 millisieverts per year’ exhibition title refers to the maximum dose of ionizing radiation originating from a nuclear power plant to which citizens of Fukushima can now be exposed in a year. In the rest of Japan and the rest of the world the maximum permitted non-occupational dose to a citizen is 1 millisievert per year, as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. (Note: Japan’s 20msv yr standard is now under review as Japan has agreed to — and should sign off on this week at the UN — the UN recommended exposure level of 1 msv.)
Tomioka, Japan. ©Lis Fields
Not thriving, but failing
Animals in radiation zones are not doing well
By Linda Pentz Gunter
It started with wolves. The packs around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which exploded on April 26, 1986, were thriving, said reports. Benefitting from the absence of human predators, and seemingly unaffected by the high radiation levels that still persist in the area, the wolves, they claimed, were doing better than ever.
Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Abundant does not necessarily mean healthy. And that is exactly what evolutionary biologist, Dr. Timothy Mousseau and his team began to find out as, over the years, they traveled to and researched in and around the Chernobyl disaster site in the Ukraine. Then, when a similar nuclear disaster hit in Japan — with the triple explosions and meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11, 2011 — Mousseau’s team added that region to its research itinerary.
Mousseau has now spent more than 17 years looking at the effects on wildlife and the ecosystem of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He and his colleagues have also spent the last half dozen years studying how non-human biota is faring in the wake of Fukushima. Ninety articles later, they are able to conclude definitively that animals and plants around Chernobyl and Fukushima are very far indeed from flourishing.
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