Slashdot Mirror
Japan's Nuclear Refugees, Still Stuck In Limbo
mdsolar tips this story at the NY Times:
"Every month, Hiroko Watabe, 74, returns for a few hours to her abandoned house near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to engage in her own small act of defiance against fate. She dons a surgical mask, hangs two radiation-measuring devices around her neck and crouches down to pull weeds. She is desperate to keep her small yard clean to prove she has not given up on her home, which she and her family evacuated two years ago after a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami devastated the plant five miles away. Not all her neighbors are willing to take the risk; chest-high weeds now block the doorways of their once-tidy homes. 'In my heart, I know we can never live here again,' said Ms. Watabe, who drove here with her husband from Koriyama, the city an hour away where they have lived since the disaster. 'But doing this gives us a purpose. We are saying that this is still our home.' While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home."
That you give us actual fucking measurement numbers in millisievert per unit of time instead of scaremongering with ambigious definitions.
If I were 74 years old and my home had an annual 5mSv radiation dose(technically in excess of 2x civilian limits). I would live there, whole fucking year. And if I die of cancer, I'd have done so anyway.
your house lands in the fallout zone of a major nuclear incident, let it go man. Cause its gone.
How about letting the elderly live there? It takes time for low level radiation to cause tumors. If you're old enough that you won't be around to see the cancer, you have nothing to worry about.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I propose a challenge.
I challenge the wealthy individuals that have made The Giving Pledge to fix this problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge
These people are the wealthiest people on the planet. They have the greatest level of resources available to them, both in the form of personal wealth and that of continued control of the worlds most powerful--and capable--corporations on the planet.
I challenge you--those that have made the pledge--to set aside your differences, political and financial aspirations and solve this problem. Forever. Just get it done.
The world is watching.You have the greatest opportunity to solve this threat, a threat to all life on our planet. NOW is the time to show the rest of the world just what kind of people you are, to show your moral fiber and to return some of your wealth to those that made it possible, and to do so in probably the most profound way possible--everyone stands to gain from such an act.
Time to put your money where your mouths are and start giving, not just your money but your corporations as well. Get them working on this problem. Use your connections to cut through the TEPCO bureaucracy, through the government red-tape. Use your patents and technologies to the greatest effect.
If you really want to help the world, the time is now.
Thank you.
I am really friekin' confused as to the radiation around Fukushima.
She considers weeding her driveway so risky that she waved away a visitor who offered to help, pointing to her dosimeter showing readings two and a half times the level that would normally force an evacuation.
Why is the radiation in her driveway so high? Why is it safe to walk around there, but not to weed the driveway?
Every time she visits, she said, she receives a dose equivalent to one or two chest X-rays even if she remains indoor
Where is that radiation coming from if they are inside their house?
The problem seems to be not knowing if the clean up will happen or not. Since no one knows how to do the job, that is not too surprising. But, at least there is a promise of compensation for lost property if the clean up is a no go. If the same thing were to happen at Indian Point, the NRC has said there would be zero compensation. http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2013/09/new-york-wonders-where-nuclear-cleanup-funds-would-come/70800/?oref=ng-dropdown And, if you check your home owners policy, there is nothing there either.
Seriously, why do people get so obsessed with their "home" which is really but a location they grow up?
That place is totally fucked up and it's a waste of time to recover or rebuild. Just abandon it and live somewhere else nice. We have the entire earth and soon the universe as our home!
Sheesh, how low can you go?
Radiation levels & evacuation
The Japanese government is coming close to lifting the evacuation order; the radiation is declining quickly. Here are the cumulative numbers from 3/23/2011 to 5/2/2011:
5/2/2011: 24.14 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 5/1); +2.99 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/25/2011: 21.15 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/24; +3.17 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/18/2011: 17.98 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/17; +3.5 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/11/2011: 14.48 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/10; +4.14 milli-sieverts from previoius week)
4/4/2011: 10.34 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/3; +5.527 milli-sieverts from previous week)
3/28/2011: 4.813 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 3/27; +3.276 milli-sieverts in 3 days)
3/25/2011: 1.537 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 3/24)
Source: http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1304002.htm
They intend to allow unrestricted repopulation of the area in early 2017. To get the 20 mSev level for 40 days, they had to pick the days right after the disaster.
The radiation levels are actually not that high these days, since most of the continuing leakages is from the poorly isolated holding pond, which they have failed to repair, into the the ocean, as opposed to into the air, which is what happened initially.
Let me start by saying that the govt's policy about not giving compensation if they think that people's homes can be cleaned isn't right. For all homes within regions that are over 20 mSv/year (the evacuation threshold), the owner should be given full compensation, to buy a new home elsewhere, if they want it. Not only is it uncertain how long cleanup will take, but it should be their choice. I also take the point about how if an area has been evacuated, it is hard to restart a society and economy, which makes it even more true that the evacuees should have the choice. (It should be noted, however, that the same applies to areas destroyed and evacuated by the earthquake and tsunami.)
The article also suggests that they're trying to avoid paying compensation because it will help make the case for restarting reactors (be reducing the estimated "cost"??) If so, they've got it 180-degrees wrong. Making these people whole and allowing them to get on with their lives will restore some faith in the govt. and utility, and make the restart case easier. Also, the continued suffering of these people in limbo makes for continued stories (like this one) that can't be helping the industry's image or popularity.
That said, having to move somewhere else (perhaps only a few miles) is a hell of a lot better than being killed (or sickened). People are losing perspective, of the things that really matter. The fact is that Fukushima, the only significant release in non-Soviet nuclear's entire 50-year history, has caused no deaths and is projected to have no measurable health impact. Meanwhile, fossil fueled power generation, like that Japan has decided to use in lieu of nuclear, causes several hundred thousand deaths every single year, along with global warming. Also, ~20,000 died in the tsunami.
It should also be noted that in most of the areas, including yellow and much orf the red areas on the map, radiation levels are actually below the (~100 mSv/yr) level at which any clearly measurable (statistically significant) increase in cancer risk is observed. So, many of the comments here that have a premise of significant cancer increases among people who would choose to live in these areas are off base. Any increases would be slight, at most, especially for older people (as some have pointed out). Also, I believe that they're (logically) focusing their clean up efforts on populated areas, so the dose rates in the villages are actually lower than what the map shows. It is true that radiation drifts back in to some degree, requiring continuous recleaning. Nonetheless, residents shouldn't be getting nearly as much as the map suggests.
Oh, an finally, it's not like such situations are unprecedented. After hurricane Katrina in the US, large sections of New Orleans were destroyed and were permanently abandoned. Many if not most of the displaced population never came back, but instead moved to other cities like Houston, or Chicago, etc... I believe that any compensation from the US govt. that these people got was meager at best; nowhere near enough to buy a new home. Jobs, you say? They were on their own in that respect to. And the size of the affected population with Katrina was ~10 times the size of the population being affected by the Fukushima meltdown. Of course, that received nowhere near the coverage that Fukushima's evacuees have, simply because nuclear power is involved.
There are already effectively volunteers - There's a fair number of old folks who moved back into their homes on the outskirts of Chernobyl. Thus far their cancer rates are tracking with that of those outside the affected area.
It's my understanding that it's a group a lot like one set of my grandparents - they consider that one spot home and want to stay there, risks or no risks.
I don't read AC A human right
I know that feeling, it can be a challenging game at times. But I'm sure these refugees are smart enough to figure out the puzzles if they persist.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Sievert is the unit of what is called "equivalent dose". As such, it takes biological effects into account, and different types of radiation are taken into account differently. The measure of "dose" is the Gray, which is J/kg (energy per mass).