九州電力玄海原発（玄海町）の運転差し止めを求める「原発なくそう！九州玄海訴訟」の口頭弁論が９日、佐賀地裁（立川毅裁判長）であり、福島第１原発事故の被災者、服部浩幸さん（４７）が意見陳述した。服部さんは小学５年の次男（１０）が福島県の甲状腺調査でのう胞が見つかり「自責の念が続いている」と訴えた。
服部さんは福島県二本松市でスーパーを営み、２０１１年の福島事故で被災した。１３年に「生業を返せ、地域を返せ！福島原発訴訟」の原告団事務局長となり、８月１０日の玄海訴訟第１９次提訴に加わった。
服部さんは９日の法廷で、次男にのう胞が見つかり経過観察中だが「事故直後、３人の子供たちだけでも避難させるべきだったのではないかと自責の念に駆られている」と声を詰まらせた。そして「私たちが人類最後の原発事故被害者であってほしい。福島の人間の心からの願い」と玄海原発を再稼働しないことを求めた。
服部さんは１０日午後１時半から佐賀商工ビル（佐賀市）で「『食』からみた福島第一原発事故と福島の今」と題して講演する。参加費無料。問い合わせは佐賀中央法律事務所（貝野さん）０９０・１０７８・２７８４。
原文はこちら。
Christine Todd Whitman, who as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks told the public the air around Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe, has admitted for the first time she was wrong.
Among those who were exposed to toxins released when the World Trade Center collapsed, the toll of illness and death continues to rise.
Speaking to the Guardian for a report on the growing health crisis to be published on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the attacks, Whitman made an unprecedented apology to those affected but denied she had ever lied about the air quality or known at the time it was dangerous.
“Whatever we got wrong, we should acknowledge and people should be helped,” she said, adding that she still “feels awful” about the tragedy and its aftermath.
“I’m very sorry that people are sick,” she said. “I’m very sorry that people are dying and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry. We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”
She added: “Every time it comes around to the anniversary I cringe, because I know people will bring up my name, they blame me, they say that I lied and that people died because I lied, people have died because I made a mistake.”
[…]
In 2003, the EPA inspector general criticized the agency’s handling of the crisis, finding that the EPA had no basis for its swift pronouncements about air quality. Politicians, including the then New York senator Hillary Clinton, laid into the Bush administration, accusing it of deceiving the public.More than 37,000 people registered with the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), a federal organisation set up in 2011 to oversee those affected by exposure to the toxins released at Ground Zero, have been declared sick. Many have chronic respiratory illnesses or cancer.
More than 1,100 people covered by the WTCHP have died. That number includes first responders who were at Ground Zero and people who lived and worked in the surrounding area.
A WTCHP spokeswoman, Christy Spring, said: “We have a list of health conditions that the program provides medical monitoring and treatment for, established by the government to have been related to exposure to the dust and debris from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.”
Whitman said: “If people are dying from this – and I have not seen the data – and they had believed everything was fine, then you have got to blame the message they were hearing, and what they were hearing was that the ambient air quality in Lower Manhattan at the time was OK.”
Jerrold Nadler, a veteran US congressman whose district covers the World Trade Center site, told the Guardian on Thursday that Whitman had never admitted she had been wrong about the air quality.
“She knew or should have known” the air was dangerous, he said.
Read more.
東京電力福島第１原発事故後に甲状腺がんと診断された子どもの治療費などを支援しようと、有識者らが「３．１１甲状腺がん子ども基金」を設立し、寄付の募集を９日始めた。１１月から給付を始める予定。
支援対象には、福島県が事故当時の１８歳以下を対象に続ける「県民健康調査」で甲状腺がんと診断され、手術を受けたか受ける予定の子どもを想定。１１月までに２０００万円集め、１人５万円程度、約４００人に対する給付を目指す。
（略）
福島県庁で記者会見した原発事故の元国会事故調査委員会委員の崎山比早子代表理事は「救うべき子どもや家族の間に、声を上げづらい雰囲気が広がっている。継続的に支援したい」と話した。
基金は、設立の呼び掛け人に脱原発を訴える小泉純一郎元首相や作家の落合恵子さんら、賛同人に女優の吉永小百合さんらが名を連ねた。寄付の振込先は城南信用金庫本店、口座名「サンイチイチコウジョウセンガンコドモキキン」、口座番号８４５５１１。事務局を設ける１７日までの基金の連絡先は ０３（５５１１）４４０２。
当サイト既出関連記事：
FUKUSHIMA – An estimated 300,000 cubic meters of waste will be generated as a result of radioactive decontamination work in a suspended section of East Japan Railway Co.’s Joban Line in Fukushima Prefecture, Jiji Press learned Saturday.
Decontamination work is going on to restore train services in the section between Namie and Tatsuta, both in the nuclear disaster-hit northeastern prefecture, by spring 2020. But how to secure enough space to temporarily keep such waste, including soil, is a difficult question.
Due to the 2011 nuclear accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 power station, the Joban Line is still suspended between Hamayoshida, in the Miyagi Prefecture town of Watari, and Soma, in Fukushima Prefecture, as well as between Odaka, in the Fukushima town of Minamisoma, and Tatsuta, in the Fukushima town of Naraha.
The Hamayoshida-Soma section is scheduled to reopen in December this year and part of the Odaka-Tatsuta section, between Odaka and Namie, in spring 2017. Ahead of the reopening, work there to replace stones under rail tracks and soil and cut trees and grass along the tracks has almost finished.
In the remaining Namie-Tatsuta portion, decontamination work is proceeding so that train services will be resumed between Tomioka, also in Fukushima Prefecture, and Tatsuta in 2017. Decontamination work is also taking place between Namie and Tomioka, a portion that runs through the heavily contaminated no-go zone so services can be resumed by the spring of 2020.
Continue reading at Fukushima railway decontamination waste to total 300,000 cubic meters
東京電力福島第１原発事故で福島市から避難した男性が、瀬戸内海の広島県尾道市・因島に定住し、無農薬によるかんきつ栽培 に取り組んでいる。島民の力添えもあって仕事は軌道に乗り始めたが、同じ海を臨む愛媛県西部には四国電力伊方原発３号機（愛媛県伊方町）が再稼働した。 「原発に絶対的な安全はない」。あの日から１１日で５年半。今も不安がぬぐえない。
（略）
１１年３月１１日、東日本大震災が起きる。原発から約５０キロ離れていたが、被ばくを心配する妻に促され、２日後に当時２歳だった長女を連れて、家族３人で尾道市の生口（いくち）島に親類を頼って避難した。
妻子も島の暮らしを気に入り、１２年春に定住を決断した。生口島と西瀬戸自動車道でつながる因島に土地約１ヘクタールを購入した。
（略）
だが、伊方原発３号機が８月１２日、約５年ぶりに再稼働。ウラン・プルトニウム混合酸化物（ＭＯＸ）燃料によるプルサーマ ル発電を行う国内唯一の原発だ。原発事故の刑事責任を問う「福島原発告訴団」に参加する長野さんは再稼働の日、原発ゲートに向かった。「再稼働を止められ ないのは分かっていた。それでも何かしないと何も変えられない」
プルサーマルは制御棒の効きが悪くなるともされ、瀬戸内海の放射能汚染への不安が胸をかすめる。「原発事故は、地震や人為的ミスなどさまざまなことで起 こりうる。福島の教訓は生かされているのか。原子力災害が再び繰り返さないか、考えずにはいられない」【高田房二郎】
NEW YORK ― In 2010, South Korea seemed to be all-in on nuclear power. The country had won a landmark bid a year earlier to build nuclear reactors across the Middle East, including a $20.4 billion deal to build four power plants in the United Arab Emirates. A top-ranking minister called for a “renaissance of nuclear energy.” Some 66 percent of South Koreans said they supported building new nuclear plants, more than any other country in a 2010 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency.
A year later, everything changed. The March 2011 tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeast Japan, causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
That presented a problem for Park Won-soon, the eco-minded human rights lawyer elected mayor of Seoul eight months after the disaster. On the one hand, he needed to slash Seoul’s planet-warming carbon emissions, a great deal of which are generated by burning coal and gas to create electricity. On the other, nuclear energy ― which supplies most of the country’s low-carbon power ― had become, so to speak, politically radioactive.
“The Fukushima accident in Japan had a big impact, even to Korean people,” Park, now in his second term as mayor, told The Huffington Post in a one-on-one interview on Tuesday. “Before that, the Korean people were usually admitting that the nuclear power plant, or fossil fuel energy, was necessary.”
Nearly a year after the Fukushima disaster, Park unveiled the city’s flagship energy policy, dubbed the “One Less Nuclear Power Plant” initiative. It aimed to reduce overall energy consumption and became the cornerstone of Seoul’s plan to overhaul its power production, in part by encouraging more people to install solar panels on rooftops. Park set a goal of cutting energy use by one nuclear power plant’s output, the equivalent of 2 million tons of burning oil.
It worked. Seoul reached its target in June 2014 ― six months ahead of schedule, according to a government report. Now, as part of the second phase of the plan, Seoul is working to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10 million tons.
But the plan also highlighted a fissure between the national government and the local leaders of Korea’s capital, a megacity where over half the country’s population lives. The national government has plans to build 11 more plants by 2024.
Seoul also continues to issue feed-in tariffs ― payments to customers who produce their own energy and sell it back to the grid ― to households in hopes of spurring more rooftop solar production, a policy the central government scrapped in 2011.“We cannot eliminate at once the whole nuclear power [industry],” Park said. “But as an experiment of Seoul, we can, step by step, eliminate [the need for] nuclear power.”
That experiment has yielded some significant progress. A core component of Seoul’s second-phase clean energy plan is electrical “self-reliance.” As part of the plan, the city has invested heavily in solar energy, granting five-year subsidies to small solar plants producing less than 100 kilowatt-hours of energy, according to a report by the consulting giant KPMG.
Just as South Korea has exported its nuclear reactor technology, the country is now becoming a major source of solar energy hardware. Sales of solar panels and other equipment reached $2.01 billion in the first half of this year, a 46.7 percent jump from the same period last year, Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency reported on Friday.
[…]
Read more.
TOKYO —
Japan’s nuclear watchdog has decided to make operators of nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities check the background of their workers to prevent terror attacks.Following the recommendation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority will introduce the new regulation in late September, although the actual implementation is expected to be from next year or later due to necessary procedures, such a revision of the rules regarding the handling of nuclear materials.
It is also unclear how the new measure will be effective in preventing terrorism as the operators will conduct the background checks based on information workers provide themselves, rather than by referrals to police or other law enforcement authorities.
The regulation will cover employees and subcontracting workers who enter restricted areas where nuclear materials are kept and those who have access to important information at the facilities.
Under the system, operators will make the workers submit a copy of their resident registry and a written oath stating they have no association with terrorist organizations or crime syndicates. Employees will also be asked where they have traveled overseas, whether they have committed any crime in the past and whether they have a history of drug addiction.
[…]
Read more.
By Arnold Gundersen
A July 2016 article in The Guardian said that the country of Ukraine has been soliciting funds for a proposed project to turn extensive swathes of ground adjacent to Chernobyl into a gigantic solar collector full of photovoltaic panels. The story’s author, John Vidal, wrote: “In a presentation sent to major banks and seen by the Guardian 6,000 hectares of ‘idle’ land in Chernobyl’s 1,000 square km exclusion zone, which is considered too dangerous for people to live in or farm, could be turned to solar, biogas and heat and power generation.”
[…]
But is it really advisable to have solar generating facilities in the exclusion zones created by a nuclear catastrophe? On the face of it, this would seem to be a benign, innovative use of contaminated land. But are there hazards slipping in under the radar, from seemingly innocuous sources—such as radioactive dust? And looking at the situation more broadly, is the endeavor indicative of society being far too casual about the effects of serious radioactive releases from nuclear power plants?
[…]
My own experience near solar arrays in Fukushima Prefecture indicates that the problems of building and maintaining solar installations in a contaminated nuclear wasteland are over-simplified, and worse, totally ignored. One of the greatest burdens of maintaining operating atomic reactors is the cost of working in a Radiologically Controlled Area. (The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory defines a Radiologically Controlled Area as: “Any area to which access is managed to protect individuals from exposure to radiation or radioactive materials. Individuals who enter Controlled Areas without entering Radiological Areas are not expected to receive a total effective dose equivalent of more than 0.1 rem (0.001 Sievert) in a year.”) Each nuclear power plant operates with specific instructions and constraints, with Radiation Work Permits tailored for each specific maintenance activity. Because special clothing, special respiratory equipment, and special radiation monitoring equipment are routinely required to perform even minimum maintenance activities inside a nuclear power plant, every activity takes longer, costs more, and requires more people inside each reactor than necessary in any other industrial setting.Consequently, the question becomes: Does building solar panels on land contaminated with nuclear waste resemble work in a normal industrial setting, or is it more similar to work inside a radiologically contaminated atomic reactor—at significantly higher cost?
[…]
Our dust samples, tested at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, found significant levels of radioactive cesium near every one of these new, post-Fukushima disaster solar collectors. Radiation levels in this dust were so high that, had they been found inside a nuclear power plant, the contaminated area would be classified as a Radiologically Controlled Area and would require a special Radiation Work Permit to enter.As a result, this means that worker exposure from internal dust inhalation would be significantly higher at solar power arrays near or in both the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi contaminated zones.
This is a significant finding, as at the moment the attitude seems to be that working in these areas is no different from working at a solar energy facility anywhere else. Instead of treating the contaminated grounds like an atomic reactor site, workers wear everyday industrial clothing to perform maintenance (and save the company significant costs in the process). I witnessed TEPCO personnel wearing paper surgical facemasks that remove only 30 percent of the radioactive dust at most. Such masks do little; the US Defense Nuclear Agency has said “It is doubtful that the use of the [paper] surgical mask served more than a psychological barrier.” The University of South Florida seems to agree, saying “…workers may experience a false sense of security when wearing [paper] surgical masks.”
During my expeditions in Fukushima Prefecture, I chose to wear an industrial-grade particulate respirator, with a 99.9 percent removal efficiency. Wearing it was uncomfortable, but after just six hours of use, the mask’s double filters each had captured 17 disintegrations per second of radioactive cesium as measured later at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. My lungs would have been contaminated with that cesium if I had only worn a surgical paper mask. Apparently, TEPCO has chosen not to protect these workers; however, we would hope that the Ukrainian government would make human health a priority, considering that it said in its presentation to banking institutions that “A special industrial area is to be created in compliance with all rules and regulations of radiation safety within the exclusion zone.” Exactly what radiation protection measures will be used by the Ukrainian government to build this solar equipment is not stated.
All solar collectors have known issues with dust buildup on their panels. If the accumulation of radioactive dust near a newly installed solar facility in Fukushima Prefecture—only five years after the meltdown—is so significant that protective clothing and respirators are required for routine maintenance, then the cost of building solar power systems in radiologically contaminated areas may prove prohibitive.
[…]
Read more.
福島第一原発の事故後の検査で甲状腺がんと診断され、治療を受ける子どもたちを経済的に支援しようと民間の基金が設立され、９日から寄付の呼びかけが始まりました。
呼びかけを行ったのは「３・１１甲状腺がん子ども基金」で、国会に設置された事故調査委員会の元委員の崎山比早子さんらが設立しました。
原発事故後、福島県が３８万人余りの子どもを対象に行った甲状腺検査では、１７３人が「がん」や「がんの疑い」と診断されています。
基金によりますと、こうした患者の家庭の中には治療費のほか、病院に通院するための費用などで経済的に困窮し、孤立しているケースもあるということです。（略）
当面、２０００万円を目標に寄付を募っていて、崎山さんは「子どもたちは今後、進学や就職、結婚を控えるなかでがんの再発や転移など一生、治療と向き合わなければならない。経済面と精神面で継続的な支援態勢を作りたい」と訴えました。
A group comprising medical and legal experts announced Friday it has launched a fund to provide financial support to children who were diagnosed with thyroid cancer after the 2011 nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima Prefecture.
The group, named 3/11 Children’s Fund for Thyroid Cancer, will start accepting donations from Sept. 20, aiming to raise at least ¥20 million. The amount could provide at least ¥50,000 each for 200 to 400 people, it said.
Donated funds will be used primarily to cover medical expenses for thyroid cancer patients in Fukushima and neighboring prefectures, it said. The group will announce more details in November on the criteria that will be used to determine who is eligible to receive the aid before it starts accepting applications.
“They are struggling to pay medical bills,” Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer and one of the founding members of the group, said at a news conference in Tokyo. “I don’t think ¥50,000 will be enough for them, but they are impoverished and are struggling, and even that amount will be of help.”
[…]
According to the group, although medical treatment for thyroid cancer is covered by public health insurance, the patients still have to pay about ¥10,000 per examination and roughly ¥150,000 for surgical procedures. And if patients have to undergo endoscopic surgery, it would cost them an additional ¥300,000, it said.
Since October 2011, the Fukushima government has conducted thyroid screenings for some 380,000 children who were aged 18 or younger.
By the end of March, a total of 173 children were diagnosed with suspected thyroid cancer. Of those, 131 were confirmed to have the cancer after undergoing surgery.
Read more at Fund started to help Fukushima thyroid cancer patients cover expenses
A nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois. Taken by photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com).
