Japan says no plan to expand nuclear evacuation zone
Tokyo – The Japanese government said Thursday that it had no immediate plans to expand a 20-kilometre evacuation zone around a damaged nuclear power station that is leaking radiation despite a recommendation to do so by the global nuclear watchdog.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tokyo would instead reinforce radiation monitoring of soil.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggested overnight that the country consider evacuating Iitate village, about 40 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, after the agency found amounts of radioactive iodine in the soil there that exceeded its health limits.
The village is not only outside the evacuation zone around the plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but it is also beyond the 30-kilometre zone in which people have been advised to stay indoors.
In the soil contamination in Iitate, IAEA experts found radioactivity from iodine-131 at 25 megabecquerel per square metre of soil, more than double the agency’s evacuation threshold of 10 megabecquerel, an unnamed IAEA source said.
‘The first assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded,’ senior IAEA official Denis Flory told reporters.
It was the highest level measured among nine communities located 25 to 60 kilometres away from the reactors, which are located 250 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.
‘They should really think about evacuating,’ the source said of the village of 7,000 people.
Further contamination of seawater was also reported. The Japanese government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Thursday that radioactive iodine at 4,385 times the legal limit was found in a seawater sample taken near the plant on the previous day.
But Hidehiko Nishiyama, an agency spokesman, said the radiation-contaminated water posed no immediate threat to human health.
‘We will do our utmost to stop it from rising,’ he said.
The agency said Wednesday that radioactive iodine at 3,355 times the legal limit had been detected in a sample also taken a day earlier from the sea near the reactors.
I’m going to get highly speculative here, and ask: why the hesitation? Why the silence? Are the people living just outside the 30 km “safe” range being written off? Or would one exodus of endangered cities and towns lead to another, and then another, all the way to Tokyo? Tokyo’s population is 12 million, or about 14,339 people per square mile — one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
No one in industry or government wants to think about worst case scenarios. Yet, a functioning government must. We put our trust in public services to turn power back on, make sure there is clean running water, working sewage and waste disposal, shelter, and an evacuation plan if there is possibility or risk of endangerment by staying.
There are worst case scenarios and then there is the unimaginable. It may actually be easier for government officials to calculate the costs of damage control at a devastatingly crippled and deteriorating nuclear power plant than it is to factor the costs of relocating the bulk of its nation’s population. This may all be a fantastic supposition. In fact, I hope it is. I hope they can contain the damage and seal off this plant with concrete, which in all likelihood they will. The sooner they do it, the better. But it is my fear and lack of scientific information that makes me ask: Will that be enough?
I’m certain the people of Japan are asking the very same thing.
Yours & truly,
Fe Bongolan
San Francisco
I should have said “migration,” I know…but I was definitely making a political point…who will take radioactive immigrants…we can’t even deal with healthy humanity moving around, can you imagine the fear & loathing that could begin? :/
How do you evacuate 12 million people? You don’t. Think about the problems in evacuating the population of Long Island through the New York Metropolitan area. Or, think about evacuating an area of more than a million people through a metropolitan area of several million. Texas has already tried that experiment courtesy of Hurricane Rita, and although the evacuation was not mandatory, the traffic jam was legendary. Survivalists always like to point out that in order to evacuate Los Angeles most vehicles need more than one tank of gas.
The reality is that the Japanese will have to dispose of a lot of contaminated food and import food from other countries at a time when commodity prices are already high and going higher. There will be a spike of radiation related cancers for a long time to come, and many people will simply live with a certain level of radiation in their environment because that is a more psychologically comfortable solution compared to leaving an area where they have emotional ties. They may only allow older people to move into the worst contaminated areas, and ban children from those areas. The Japanese may have made a great deal of progress in repairing the wounds of World War II, but don’t kid yourself that a large influx of Japanese refugees would be welcome in other Asian countries.
And although radiation certainly carries special risks, ask yourself how many people are living with poisoned environments in the US and elsewhere and have not been evacuated or even noticed? As Eric has pointed out so many times, most of us are so used to abuse by those with power that we hardly notice it any more. The Japanese will encase it and history will move on, hopefully toward a saner approach to energy.
Immigration, yes. I should have been clearer in framing my question as, “Where are the Japanese to go on an island that’s being contaminated?” And in that sense we’re all on the same island now.
cmassy, that’s the same question I’ve been asking: why haven’t these reactors been encased in sand and concrete yet? Even if that isn’t much of a long-term solution, might it not at least have lessened the worst of the chain reactions long enough to keep workers in the area to deal with the problem? The fact is those cores were shot the minute seawater was dumped on them, if not before. Seems to me the same old corporate mentality at work, thinking of a bottom line that’s already been rendered invalid anyway.
Fe, I couldn’t agree more. The atomic chain reaction may well spark others, exacerbating food and water shortages, poisoning seafood stocks, affecting growing regions in a much wider area than it yet has, or has been acknowledged yet anyway. Having followed the unfolding patterns of these predicted trends for years now, I can’t say its a surprise. But it does seem like the reactor crisis is pushing it all into some collapsed time wave of probability at the end of a great cycle. Maybe Terrence McKenna was right, and it’s zero-hour at Hot L Earth. The sheer scale of this disaster in all its many forms and consequences is almost Douglas Adams-esque, without any of the laughter.
Rob 44:
The fact is, we may actually be seeing more mass migrations–not only with this, but I can imagine food and water shortages elsewhere.
We are all held together on this island earth. We are getting crash-coursed into realizing it.
Interesting that you should bring this up as I was thinking roughly the same thing yesterday. If the contamination continues to spread out as it seems to be doing, how much in the way of resources (i.e., food, shelter, jobs, etc.) are left to feasibly sustain all the people remaining in an area? And seeing as the people remaining in the shelters have little in the way of money, jobs or things, how do they get to wherever they need to be relocated to? Do they just stay in the shelters, in a contaminated zone for the rest of their lives?
And my biggest question is: why haven’t these reactors been encased in sand and cement ALREADY? What could they possibly be waiting for…?
immigration
In my view, your fears are grounded, and your supposed lack of scientific information irrelevant in the face of what looks, sounds, and smells like the unimaginable. Japanese citizens are being life-shortened or worse as we speak. And time will only confirm that, I believe. The failure to admit the extent of the danger to the public there, the official denials that mirror the cultural denials of atomic energy’s horrific risks–that’s as great a tragedy as the entire natural/man-made disaster itself. I keep hearing the poet W.S. Merwin’s line over and over as this nightmare unfolds–“We are asleep with compasses in our hands.” But where are the Japanese to go, even if the truth is told? They’re on an island as much as we are, and as much as we forget that truth.