Nuclear contamination poses long-term threat to ocean...
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Nuclear contamination poses long-term threat to ocean ecosystem and to Japan's fishing industry.
A new report shows the March 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan is now also responsible for the world's worst nuclear sea contamination and the prefecture's governor has called for all 10 of the area's reactors to be scrapped.
During the peak of Ukraine's Chernobyl cataclysm of 1986, the Black Sea was registering 1,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water; this appears miniscule in comparison to nuclear levels at Fukushima's peak recorded at 100,000 becquerels.
Scientists first believed the ocean would dilute the radioactivity, but Al Jazeera has learned that dangerous concentrations of radioactive caesium remain.
Long Term Effects of Fukushima
Japan's nuclear disaster is far worse than governments have revealed to the public. Effects from the fallout have been felt in both the U.S. and in Canada but their significance has been downplayed.
The "Abandoned People" and Civic Empowerment. The nuclear reactor meltdown and explosion at four reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the third large-scale nuclear disaster to hit Japan. This time, however, Japan inflicted it on itself.
Two weeks after the disaster The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity . . . To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima's victims. Now Japan, the "pacifist nation sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella," as Oe puts it, had allowed itself to buy into the illusion of a dichotomy between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the former evil and the latter peaceful.
Anti-nuclear sentiment had grown rapidly in post-1945 Japan, especially after the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon was subjected to radiation from a US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954, touching off Japan's powerful anti-nuclear weapons movement. But that sentiment would be largely eclipsed by the Eisenhower administration's "atoms for peace program" leading Japan to invest heavily in nuclear power. In 2011, Japan would pay a heavy price for ignoring the risks, and building fifty-four nuclear power plants around the coastline of its earthquake- and tsunami-prone islands. The two forms of the nuclear were in fact comparable in their potential to inflict devastation.
Will people of the periphery choose to remain abandoned? Certainly not all. In Northeastern Japan, many people have stood up, taking safety into their own hands. Citizen groups conduct independent radiation measurements and publish their own radiation protection guides.
Where do we go from here?
video credit: Al Jazeera
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