Beyond Nuclear International
The cows died
But mandatory slaughter of Fukushima’s radioactive cattle was just the beginning of a new tragedy
Japanese filmmaker, Tamotsu Matsubara’s, heartbreaking documentary — translated in English as Nuclear Cattle — is ostensibly about the cattle farmers in the Fukushima radiation zone, forced to make devastating choices. Do they slaughter their radioactive cattle, or keep tending to them, even though they can never sell the meat, or must throw all the milk away?
But the film is about something more than that — a loss of touch with our fundamental humanity, with nature, and with stewardship of all living things. It’s about a societal shift. If we are willing to rush the Fukushima nuclear disaster out of sight, and prioritize the economy over the well-being of human and animal lives, what does that say about where our society is headed?
The film was recently screened on line in France, before which Matsubara made his own statement. The film can be seen in its entirety on YouTube (it is embedded further down in this story). But Matsubara’s statement is a powerful one. We present it here, in full. (You can also watch it here in Japanese with French subtitles, from which we translated it.)
A statement by Tamotsu Matsubara
I made my documentary film over the course of five years starting in June 2011, filming within a 30km radius around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a zone where the public is forbidden from going. The film shows the suffering of farmers whose cows are radioactive.
At the start of the film, there is a horrific scene where we see cows in a barn who have died of hunger. It’s a scene that symbolizes the consequences of a nuclear accident. The inhabitants didn’t know what was happening. They told them to leave without taking anything with them, and without telling them where they were going.
The radioactive plume, a mass of highly radioactive air, was moving in the same direction as the evacuees — towards the Northwest. The inhabitants were exposed to radioactive fallout which came down in rain and snow.
The members of the government and TEPCO must have known the direction of the wind and the consequent risk but this information was not disclosed. The government and TEPCO deliberately held back this information.
This tragedy is not a result of natural causes but of human ones.
Read MoreNecessary trouble
Released from jail, Fr. Steve Kelly insists no one is truly free under the threat of nuclear omnicide
By Leonard Eiger
When Father Steve Kelly, a nuclear resister and Jesuit priest, walked out of a Tacoma, Washington courthouse on April 13, 2021, he was still wearing his prison khakis. When he was taken from jail in Georgia in mid-December to be transported to Tacoma, he had left in chains.
Now Kelly was a free man. But for how long? In Tacoma, Magistrate Judge David Cristel sentenced Kelly to time served, and released him without conditions. Kelly had effectively served the maximum six-month prison sentence for violating conditions of his supervised release for a 2017 trespass conviction at the Trident nuclear submarine base in Silverdale, Washington during a Pacific Life Community nonviolent direct action.
But now Kelly must report to the probation department in Georgia to begin three years of supervised release to fulfill the terms of an earlier sentence for his part in the April 4, 2018 trespass onto the Kings Bay Trident submarine base there, an action by the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. And that will likely spell more necessary trouble.
Prison garb and chains are not unfamiliar to Kelly, a man of conscience, who is unlikely to give up his peaceful non-violent protests against nuclear weapons any time soon. As he told the Tacoma court:
“This is the way to love everyone in this courtroom. This is the way to love our fellow human beings, is that I had to take a stand against the nuclear weapons. And of course what happened in Georgia… was a continuation of my acting in conscience. I think that it’s probably best said that while there are nuclear weapons out there, my conscience will probably be very consistent about this.”
Kelly won’t go to Georgia. It will be up to US marshals to bring him back there.
Read MoreOrkney’s uranium reprieve
Maxwell Davies’ music memorializes an important victory
By Linda Pentz Gunter
On a midsummer day on Saturday, June 21, 1980, in a Victorian Hotel on the Orkney Islands, resident composer Peter Maxwell Davies and actress Eleanor Bron performed the composer’s newest piece — The Yellow Cake Revue. It was part of the Islands’ annual St. Magnus Festival, founded by Maxwell Davies, poet George Mackay Brown and Archie Bevan.
“Yellow cake” or uranium ore, seemed like an unlikely subject matter for a cabaret. But Maxwell Davies was an unlikely kind of musician — deeply connected to causes including gay rights, anti-war and the environment.
I first learned of the music of Maxwell Davies through Donald Ranvaud, another renaissance polymath, who was teaching at the University of Warwick when I was a student there and inspired in me a passion for Italian cinema, especially Bertolucci and Pasolini.
Don, who went on to become an internationally celebrated film producer, was also determined to introduce me to the music of “Max,” as he called the composer, and who he obviously knew personally, one of many leading lights in the arts who would become friends of Don’s — Bertolucci was another. (Ranvaud and Maxwell Davies died in 2016 and Bertolucci two years later.)
So off I went to London to hear the latest Maxwell Davies work, performed by the chamber ensemble, The Fires of London, co-founded by Maxwell Davies and fellow avant garde composer, Harrison Birtwistle.
That concert — bold, wild, different — was in 1975. But unbeknownst to me at the time, Maxwell Davies and his fellow residents of the Orkney Islands, — an archipelago located just off the northeastern coast of Scotland and where the Salford-born Maxwell Davies had chosen to settle — were already confronting an ominous new threat that would consume the islands for several years.
Read MoreKeeping it short…and right
New Talking Points lay out key messages against nuclear power
Beyond Nuclear is developing a new series of handy Talking Points. You can find these in a special Talking Points section on this website and also under Publications on the Beyond Nuclear website. Look for others in the series in the coming months.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Closing a costly US nuclear power plant — which will only get costlier the older it gets — and buying efficiency instead, would actually save considerably more carbon than continuing to run that nuclear plant.
That’s a pretty significant statement. It tells us that the argument that we need to keep current nuclear plants running — because they are here, now, and, in the operational stage, low carbon emitters — is invalid. It would only be valid to argue for the continued use of current, aging nuclear power plants if every other alternative was more carbon-intensive, and more expensive and slower.
The same is true for the argument that we must develop and build new nuclear power plants to address climate change, because, argues the nuclear lobby, renewables just aren’t here now in great enough numbers to fill the gap.
In reality, diverting funds from real solutions, and spending these instead on developing slow, expensive, untested new nuclear plants, just makes this argument a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the same allocation of funds, renewables would have saved more carbon far faster and more cheaply.
All this is argued effectively — and laid out simply —in the first of our series of Talking Points — a double-sided single page handout called Why nuclear power slows action on climate change.
We’ll be doing a series of these Talking Points, on different topics, drawn from the many excellent studies and reports out there, but which are sometimes a lot to take on board. However, when condensed down, they can provide a useful, empirically-supported script for our work, whether writing opeds or letters to the editor, educating and lobbying our elected officials, or doing media outreach. (If you’d like to support future such Talking Points, we gratefully accept donations to help pay for them.)
Read MoreBelieving in the impossible
Working for a weapons of mass destruction-free Middle East
UPDATE: Join the CND event on May 22 — Working for Peace in the Middle East — featuring METO’s Sharon Dolev (Israel) and Emad Kiyaei (Iran). Register here.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Hunkered down in the Covid isolation that so many of us have struggled with, three individuals got together. Not in person, but to consolidate and formalize an idea. It was an idea that Israel and the Arab States, some of which latter are at enmity with each other, not only should, but can, live at peace in the region.
And so it was that an Israeli, an Iranian and a Brit came to formalize an earlier conception— the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO). For many years just a campaign, METO became its own entity when its three founders — Sharon Dolev of Israeli, Emad Kiyaei of Iran, and Paul Ingram of the United Kingdom — found themselves with pandemic-induced time on their hands.
Accordingly, they registered METO as its own organization and set up a website. Then they told their story to the international news agency, Pressenza. (Beyond Nuclear is a partner organization with Pressenza.)
Their inspiration came from the discovery that they were, says Dolev, “campaigning on something that everybody believes has no solution.” She asked herself: “it seems like everybody is asking for something impossible to happen while they believe that it’s impossible. How can you campaign on something that everybody believes that it’s impossible?”?
So she, Ingram and Kiyaei decided to find a way make it “possible.”
In the days when getting together was another thing that was still “possible,” Dolev met with Ingram and they “just mapped out everything that they said was impossible,” and started to “imagine” the zone — a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. A Middle East at peace.
Read MoreLiving with Chernobyl
Personal stories from the world’s worst nuclear disaster
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Join an online event with Maxine Peake, Kate Brown, Darragh McKeon and Linda Walker on Sunday, April 25 to learn more, engage with the panelists and ask questions. Register here.
What was it like to live through the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine? And now, 35 years later, what are the health, environmental and social repercussions of that disaster?
And if you had lived through the event — or chose to research it later — how would you tell the story?
On Sunday April 25, from 12 noon to 1:15pm Eastern US time, learn how those involved with the disaster, or who suffered from it later, responded.
For some, it was a grueling experience. Journalist, Svetlana Alexievich decided it was important to record those testimonials. Her resulting book — called Voices from Chernobyl or Chernobyl Prayer, depending on where it was published — lets those who were there tell you what it was like, in often harrowing and heart-rending detail. Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Arundhati Roy, said of the experience of reading Alexievich’s book: “it’s been years since I had to look away from a page because it was just too heart-breaking to go on”.
Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the book, worked for years to chronicle the eye-witness, lived accounts of 500 people including liquidators, nearby residents, firefighters, evacuees and families, these latter often split apart.
On April 25, renowned British actor, Maxine Peake, will read from Chernobyl Prayer as part of a global public reading of the book by women around the world.
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