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."
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.