The Children Of
Fukushima Are Dying
Common Dreams has just released a report
that the children of Fukushima are dying. Thyroid cancer rates in children
living near the accident have risen to more than forty times (40x) normal.
Nearly 200,000 children out of the 375,000 tested have been found to suffer from pre-cancerous
thyroid abnormalities, primarily
nodules and cysts and the rate is increasing. Joseph Mangano, Executive
Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, said that more than 120
childhood cancers have been detected in a population that would normally expect
three.
There is anger from the public regarding government plans
to force families, many of whom have small children, to move back into the
heavily contaminated region surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.
Despite denials from the nuclear industry, which has, in
some instances, insisted that “not one person” has been affected, the
numbers are consistent with children who lived in the vicinity of previous
nuclear events that took place at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Recent reports from the United Nations Scientific
Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) have downplayed the
human toll of the disaster. UNSCEAR is joined at the hip with the United
Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose mission is, not
surprisingly, to promote nuclear power.
The IAEA has a long-term gag order on
United Nations’ findings on the health impacts of the industry. Fukushima is
another in the long line of incidents that have been downplayed.
One need look no farther than Chernobyl to see the results of an
accident that has been dwarfed by Fukushima. More than 5,000 studies have
produced an estimated death toll of more than a million people. Some 80 percent
of the children born downwind from the Chernobyl event have suffered a wide range
of impacts, including birth defects, thyroid cancer and long-term heart,
respiratory and mental illnesses. EIGHTY PERCENT! That is 4 out of every 5
children!
The ongoing accident that occurred on March 11, 2011 is
yet to be contained and will require decades of monitoring and cleanup. At
present, there has been no solution to the problem of what to do with the
contaminated water used to keep the damaged reactors cool, other than to erect
more storage tanks.
Those tanks have been leaking and the contamination is
leeching into the ground, the groundwater and out into the Pacific. The leakage
translates into irradiated foodstuffs that are then served up to the local
population. There is no telling what effect an uninterrupted stream of
irradiated water into the ocean will have over time, but one cannot expect that
it will be anything good.
For those who say that nuclear power is cheap and clean,
I say it is neither. All it takes is one event like the one still unfolding in
Fukushima to illustrate how dangerous and foolhardy it is to continue with an
energy program that has the potential to poison our people and our planet.
The
monetary cost of cleaning up Fukushima, not to mention the cost in human lives,
is just not worth it. In this new technological age, we have a real opportunity
to change the way we power our planet and to do it cleanly, efficiently and
cost-effectively by harnessing the power of the sun and the wind.
But it is too late for the dying children of Fukushima,
who are guilty of nothing more than living in the vicinity of a nuclear
disaster.
Ann Werner
is a blogger and the author of CRAZY and Dreams and Nightmares. You can view her work at ARK Stories. Visit her on
Twitter @MsWerner and
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