According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, between 12,000 and 83,000 children were born with congenital deformations in the region of Chornobyl after the disaster. Only 10 percent of the overall expected damage can be seen in the first generation.[33] In April and May of 2012, there was a significant (51 percent) rise in stillbirths and infant deaths in the four most contaminated prefectures near Fukushima—Miyagi, Gunma, Tochigi, and Ibaraki.
There are many Japanese people now living on lands significantly contaminated with radioactive cesium, where foodstuffs are now being gathered and grown. The massive, ongoing releases of radioactivity into the Pacific Ocean have also widely contaminated the seafood that makes up the traditional Japanese diet. Japanese children living in contaminated regions, who routinely consume contaminated foodstuffs, are at risk for developing the same types of health problems that are often seen in the infants, children, and teenagers of Belarus and Ukraine, who also live in lands contaminated with cesium-137.
It is imperative that we recognize the danger posed to children by the routine ingestion of contaminated foodstuffs. This requires that the currently accepted radiation “safety” standards set up by the nuclear industry, which do not predict any significant health hazards from chronic internal exposure to ionizing radiation, must be either revised or replaced. We need new standards that recognize and predict the dangers to health now manifested in large populations of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian children made sick because they must subsist upon “dirty” foodstuffs contaminated with so-called low-dose radiation.
It is also imperative that we prevent further nuclear disasters that release these fiendishly toxic nuclear poisons into the global ecosystems. Given the immense amounts of long-lived radionuclides that now exist in the used or “spent” nuclear fuel stored at every nuclear power plant, this is an urgent task.
The long-lived radionuclides produced by nuclear power plants are neither “safe” nor “clean.” It was and is a very bad idea to routinely manufacture these nuclear poisons simply so we can boil water in order to make steam to generate electricity.[34] It is imperative that we immediately stop nuclear power plants from manufacturing thousands of tons of nuclear poison every year, which create a toxic legacy for the next three thousand generations of human beings.
Most important, we must now turn our full attention to finding a means to safely and permanently remove from the biosphere the more than three hundred thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste that we have already created. These deadly toxins must be isolated from the ecosystems for at least one hundred thousand to one million years. Should we fail to permanently contain and prevent them from entering the biosphere, these nuclear poisons will at some point represent an existential threat to humans and many other forms of complex life.
6
What Did the World Learn from the Fukushima Accident?
Akio Matsumura
I have worked at the United Nations and other international organizations for forty years. I have organized and attended many international conferences, starting with the UN population conference in Bucharest in 1974. Over the years we have discussed in public and in private what you might consider the defining issues of the twenty-first century: population, the environment, socioeconomic issues, disarmament, women and children, and democracy. But we have never discussed how one accident in a nuclear power plant could affect our lives for the next several hundred years, or how we lack a permanent nuclear waste repository that could store spent fuel rods for one hundred thousand years.
I worry about the growing risk to children who continue to be exposed to radiation. Many children will suffer from ill health; many will develop thyroid, lung, and breast cancer. Fukushima has so far emitted more radiation than Chornobyl, and over one million people have died of illness as a result of the Chornobyl accident. In my two visits to Japan in 2012, I met with political leaders there and asked them for their thoughts on the risk of thyroid cancer in children from the unstable reactors. Few of them knew about the spent fuel rods. Fewer still were thinking about their impact on public health. Undoubtedly some politicians are aware of the potential catastrophe, but even they were surprised when I told them that Unit 4 had ten times more cesium-137 than Chornobyl and five thousand times more than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima seven decades ago. They could not hide their shock when I told them that all of the spent-fuel assemblies at Fukushima Daiichi contained eighty-five times more cesium than Chornobyl, and fifty thousand to one hundred thousand times more than what was released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. These same politicians wondered why they had heard none of this from TEPCO.
In April 2012, I met with then–chief cabinet secretary Osamu Fujimura. He assured me he would convey a message to then–prime minister Yoshihiko Noda before he met with U.S. president Barack Obama. Both leaders might have discussed Fukushima at their private meeting, but the idea for an independent assessment team and international aid were not mentioned publicly. This was a mistake. The government’s first responsibility is the security of its citizens. Instead of reaching out to independent scientists, they only consulted TEPCO. They focused on minimizing the public-relations fallout instead of the nuclear radiation fallout. In any country, government and industry will not disclose all sensitive information after a disaster, but the secrecy of Japan’s leaders has been excessive. Because of the government’s unwillingness to share accurate information, the Japanese people must rely on the media for useful information regarding the accident. Unfortunately, journalists in Japan are equally complacent and clueless. There is an astonishing disconnect in Japan between the reality of Fukushima and the fictional image that the public has of what happened there. The media has failed in their job to close this gap. Japanese reporters, with several exceptions, have refused to investigate or ask the right questions about Fukushima.
The government has not made this easy. TEPCO determines when and what information will be released, such as when the reactor site will be open to the media, when video footage of the accident will be released, and whether the accuracy of government medical reports is in question. Without anyone to ask the right questions, the public is left behind a smoke screen and forced to rely on half-truths. The public’s efforts to end nuclear power in Japan are inspiring, but they are the result of fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will ensure Japan remains dependent on nuclear energy. He will restart Japan’s nuclear reactors. Of all the politicians I met, he was the least receptive toward the danger faced by the country’s children and the spent fuel rods at Unit 4. It fills me with sadness that we must sacrifice tens of thousands of children for the public to realize disaster is at hand.
34
Nuclear power plants produce electricity using the same principle as coal- and gas-fired power plants. They produce large amounts of heat in order to boil water and produce steam, which then is used to power the turbines that generate electricity. Nuclear power plants were not invented to make electricity. They were designed to produce plutonium to be used in nuclear weapons. Every thousand-megawatt commercial nuclear plant that uses uranium for fuel produces enough plutonium every year to build about forty nuclear weapons.