“A comprehensive decontamination is impossible”
via Fukushima evacuees forced back into unacceptably high radiation zones — Beyond Nuclear International
Month: December 2018
Former mayor expresses anger at Tepco in trial over Fukushima crisis
December 5, 2018
FUKUSHIMA – A former mayor of a city hit by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis told a court on Wednesday that he wants to express his “anger” on behalf of citizens who had to flee their homes due to the disaster and whose lives are still filled with uncertainties.
Katsunobu Sakurai, who was mayor of Minamisoma at the time the crisis erupted, testified before the Fukushima District Court in a lawsuit filed by 151 people seeking ¥3.7 billion ($32.7 million) in damages from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. They say the nuclear accident destroyed their communities due to the evacuations.
Sakurai was chosen among U.S. Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2011 after sharing the city’s predicament and calling for support via YouTube in the wake of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
Following the accident, part of the city was…
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Reverend G Nagase’s 2018 Hiroshima Day speech
A Speech delivered by Reverend G. Nagase on Hiroshima Day, 6 August 2018, at Tavistock Square, London:
NAMUMYOHORENGEKYO
Next year – 2019 – will mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary. It will also mark John Ruskin’s 200th birth anniversary. In 1904, in South Africa, Gandhiji read Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and the book galvanized him. It changed his life. In Unto This Last, Ruskin clearly states: ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’.
In 1908, Mahatma Gandhi paraphrased Unto This Last into Gujarati, and entitled it SARVODAYA. Sarvodaya means ‘equal rise or prosperity of all, without exception’. Gandhiji used the concept of Sarvodaya to envisage the establishment of a peaceful society through the nonviolence of the brave and the compassionate.
In 1897, the famous American sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941) visited John Ruskin at his home Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water in the Lake District. After Ruskin’s passing in 1900, Borglum created a sculpture of Ruskin in 1903 which today sits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.
John Ruskin was born in Brunswick Square at 54 Hunter Street, a mere 500 metres or so from here. In this progressive borough of Camden, Brunswick Square is yet to have a statue of Ruskin, and Hunter Street does not have a blue plaque marking his birth place.
In 1946, Mahatma Gandhi said: “So far as I can see, the Atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There used to be the so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no law except that of might. … I assume that Japan’s greed was more unworthy. But the greater unworthiness conferred no right on the less unworthy of destroying without mercy men, women and children of Japan in a particular area. The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bombs, even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. Mankind has to get out of violence only through non- violence. Hatred can be overcome only by love.”
A Chant for Peace: NAMUMYOHORENGEKYO.
With palms together in prayer,
Nipponzan Myohoji London Dojo
Reverend G. Nagase
Reverend G. Nagase’s speech can be found on page 15 of Gandhi Way, no. 138, available from the Gandhi Foundation: https://gandhifoundation.org/resources/
TEPCO and state slapped with new lawsuit over nuclear crisis
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against TEPCO and the government gather in front of the Fukushima District Court in Fukushima on Nov 27.
November 28, 2018
FUKUSHIMA–Dismayed at a breakdown in talks for compensation, residents of the disaster-stricken town of Namie filed a lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the central government for damages stemming from the nuclear accident here in March 2011.
The plaintiffs are seeking 1.3 billion yen ($11.4 million) in financial redress.
The entire town was evacuated in the aftermath of a triple core meltdown at TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
The lawsuit was filed at the Fukushima District Court on Nov. 27 after five years of negotiations between the town and TEPCO collapsed in April over the utility’s refusal to meet demands for more compensation.
According to court papers, 109 plaintiffs of 49 households…
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Spatial pattern of plutonium and radiocaesium contamination released during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster
November 14, 2018
Abstract
Plutonium and radiocaesium are hazardous contaminants released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (FDNPP) disaster and their distribution in the environment requires careful characterisation using isotopic information. Comprehensive spatial survey of 134Cs and 137Cs has been conducted on a regular basis since the accident, but the dataset for 135Cs/137Cs atom ratios and trace isotopic analysis of Pu remains limited because of analytical challenges. We have developed a combined chemical procedure to separate Pu and Cs for isotopic analysis of environmental samples from contaminated catchments. Ultra-trace analyses reveal a FDNPP Pu signature in environmental samples, some from further afield than previously reported. For two samples, we attribute the dominant source of Pu to Reactor Unit 3. We review the mechanisms responsible for an emergent spatial pattern in 134,135Cs/137Cs in areas northwest (high 134Cs/137Cs, low 135Cs/137Cs) and southwest (low 134Cs/137Cs, high 135Cs/137Cs) of FDNPP. Several samples exhibit…
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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…
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REMEMBER FUKUSHIMA 