S.T.

October 25, 2013

by Yasuo Akai

About 5 years ago, I was giving a lecture in Hokkaido. When I said we must keep cooling down the waste for 50 years, and then monitoring it for 300 years, a junior high school girl interrupted me and cried, “who will do it? You say it will take 50 or 300 years. You adults cannot do it. It’s our generation and the next generations who will do it. But we don’t want to do it!” Which of us adults can find an answer for her?

Moreover, it is not just about 50, or 300 years. So long as nuclear power plants are in operation,those years may never come.

Nearby residents are exposed to radiation and discriminated against.

The government and the industry have kept lying to us for decades, saying that no radioactive materials have ever been leaked by Japan’s nuclear power plants. They can no longer doso. Radioactive materials are disgorged from the tall cooling towers intentionally. Radioactive materials are spewed constantly, so those nearby residents are constantly exposed to radiation.

A 23-year-old woman wrote to me, her letter appeared to be smudged by tears. It went like this, “I began my career and met a man in Tokyo. We were engaged, and our families met and exchanged engagement gifts. But this man has suddenly broken our engagement. He says that nothing is wrong with me and he wanted to marry me, but his parents were worried because Ihad lived in Tsuruga City for more than 10 years. As children near the nuclear power plant tend to be born with leukemia, they were afraid that they would have a grandchild with leukemia. His parents do not agree with him. What’s wrong with me?” Of course, there is nothing wrong with her. I sometimes hear these kinds of stories.

This happened in Tokyo, but not in some of the areas near the plants. Frankly, are you happy if your daughter marries a nuclear power plant worker? Or, would you want to marry such a worker? I know that it is insensitive to say this, that it is discrimination. But I argue that we must talk about these kinds of stories. Those standing opposed to nuclear power plants should say that they are not only protesting because horrible accidents can occur, but also because it causes discrimination. These nuclear power plants are also destroying our minds.

Can I have a baby? I don’t care about electricity. I hate the nuclear power plant.

I am going to talk about a story about what happened during my lecture hosted by the Teachers Union in Kyowa Town, which was located near the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. I ask that you remember this sometime; you can forget the rest.

The meeting took place in the evening. Half of the audience were parents, and the other half was made up of teachers, but some high school and junior high school students also showed up. They did not take a view such that nuclear power plants were only an adult problem, butrather their problem as well.Finishing my talk, I took some questions. An 8 grade girl, crying, spoke to us, “you adults are liars, hypocrites. I came here to face you all. I wanted to know who you are. You say you are against pesticides, golf courses, and nuclear power plants. You say you do so for your children. I’m sure you’re just pretending to act against all this.

I live in Kyowa Town, near the Tomari nuclear power plant, and I’ve been exposed to radiation. The ratio of babies with leukemia is higher around nuclear facilities in Sellafield, England, than in other places. I know this because I read a book. I’m a girl, and I will probably marry someday. Is it ok for me to have a baby?” No one had an answer for her.

“If a nuclear power plant is that horrible, why didn’t you all go against it more seriously when they started building it? You even allowed them to build a No. 2 reactor. I don’t care about electricity. I hate the nuclear power plant.” The No. 2 reactor of the Tomari Nuclear Power Planthad just been put into operational testing.“For what reason are you meeting here? If I was an adult and I had a baby, I’d use violence to stop it. I wouldn’t hesitate to risk my own life.

“The radiation I’m exposed to is now doubled because of this second reactor, but I won’t leave Hokkaido.”

I asked her if she had ever talked about her anxiety to her mother or teacher. “My mother andteacher are here now, but I’ve never brought this up before,” she said. “We girls always talk about this. We can’t marry. We can’t have a baby.”

I was told that their teachers did not know that they thought this way. An evacuation drill for residents living within 8 or 10-kilometer radius will not solve this anxiety. People 50, or 100 kilometres away from a nuclear power plant are also anxious. You should know that adolescents react to this anxiety vividly.

As long as there are nuclear power plants, we do not feel safe.

Now you know what nuclear power plant is.

You might have heard of the horror of the Chernobyl Accident and felt a little anxious. Yet, you may still think we still need those nuclear power plants, that without them we would have anelectricity shortage. It is especially those who live in cities, distanced from these plants, whomight still view them as a necessary evil.

However, that is because you were always told by the government and the electric power companies about the “peaceful use of nuclear power,” that it is “absolutely safe,” and that “Japan has no natural resources.”   They spend huge amount of money for this propaganda.

They hide, for example, the Monju Accident.

The nuclear power plants generate electricity, but the thing is that they cannot work without exposing plant workers to radiation. That is what I have seen and experienced for 20 years. Moreover, nuclear power plants destroy local communities. When one is built, it divides the residents into two camps, and when it is put into operation, it exposes those residents to radiation and opens innocent people up to discrimination.

You may know that a nuclear power plant can cause a horrible accident and still think that it is really safe, that everything will be fine. You may agree with the possibility of peaceful uses for nuclear power. But think about this: the workers are dying of exposure and the residents are suffering—you cannot call this peaceful use.

Even if it was safe, you could not feel safe. You can never feel safe as long as it exists. Moreover at this moment, nuclear power plants appear to generate electricity. However, in order to manage radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years, it needs much more electricity and oil. The energy needed to manage that waste must be higher than the energy that the plants have been generating. Additionally, it will be our children and grandchildren who manage thewaste and the closed reactors.

How can you say that this is peaceful use of nuclear power? I repeat. There is never a peaceful use.
Therefore I ask you; please look at the face of your children and grandchildren every morning and ask yourself, why. Why is only Japan still building nuclear power plants? There are accidents, and earthquakes. If we do not act now, irreversible damage will be done, you must see this.

So I am acting against these nuclear power plants. I am absolutely against building new ones,and I argue that those plants in operation must be stopped.

As long as those nuclear power plants exist, there is no peace.

A peaceful planet for children

Translator’s note:The original text (in Japanese) is here:http://www.iam-t.jp/HIR AI/pageall.html This site says the author Norio Hirai was an engineer specializing in plant pipeline, and died in January, 1997. Translated by Yasuo Akai -- revised by Jayda Fogel
http://www.academia.edu/667416/Norio_Hirai_I_Want_You_to_Know_What_a_Nuclear_Power_Plant_Is_

The key motivation, he said, behind the nuclear industry’s push to significantly weaken safety standards is that the line of smaller nuclear power plants the nuclear industry is now pushing—including what it calls the “small modular nuclear reactor”—is that they are going to be “much more expensive” than the existing light-water nuclear power plants, the most common type of nuclear power plant which are large and are cooled by plain water. Thus, he said, these “advanced” nuclear plants would be more costly to operate than using energy alternatives, “certainly wind and solar.”
COUNTERPUNCH

NOVEMBER 22, 2022 BY KARL GROSSMAN


SNIPPET:

The lone NRC vote against the change came from Commissioner Jeffery Baran who in casting his ‘no’ vote wrote “Multiple, independent layers of protection against potential radiological exposure are necessary because we do not have perfect knowledge of new reactor technologies and their unique potential accident scenarios….Unlike light-water reactors, new advanced reactor designs do not have decades of operating experience; in many cases, the new designs have never been built or operated before.”

He noted a NRC “criteria” document which declared that the agency “has a longstanding policy of siting nuclear reactors away from densely populated centers and preferring areas of low population density.”

But, said Baran, under the new policy, a “reactor could be sited [b[size=14]within[/size] a town of 25,000 people and right next to a large city[/b]. For reactor designs that have not been deployed before and do not have operating experience, that approach may be insufficiently protective of public health and safety…And it would not maintain the key defense-in-depth principle of having prudent siting limitations regardless of the features of a particular reactor design—a principle that has been a bedrock of nuclear safety.”

That is just one of the many reductions proposed in safety standards.

Full article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/22/nuclear-guinea-pigs-nrcs-licensing-of-experimental-nuclear-plants/