Hundreds in Tokyo protest dropped charges over Fukushima crisis
Photo: EPA
Hundreds rallied in Tokyo Saturday to protest Japanese prosecutors' decision to drop charges over the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with no one yet punished nearly three years after the "man-made" disaster. No one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of radiation released when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake crashed into the Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, swamping cooling systems and sparking reactor meltdowns.
However, some Fukushima residents committed suicide owing to fears over radiation, while others died during evacuation. Official data released last week showed that 1,656 people have died in the prefecture from stress and other illnesses related to the disaster three years ago.
"There are many victims of the accident, but there is no (charged) assailant," chief rally organiser Ruiko Muto, 61, told the protesters, displaying a photograph of Kawauchi village which was hit by the nuclear accident.
"We are determined to keep telling our experiences as victims to pursue the truth of the accident, and we want to avoid a repeat of the accident in the future," she said.
Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes around the plant, with scientists warning some areas may have to be abandoned.
"I used to grow organic rice... But I can't do it anymore because of consumers' worries over radioactive contamination," Kazuo Nakamura, 45, a farmer from Koriyama city in Fukushima prefecture, told the rally.
"I want (Fukushima operator) TEPCO officials and bureaucrats of the central government to eat the Fukushima-made rice," he shouted to applause.
A parliamentary report has said Fukushima was a man-made disaster caused by Japan's culture of "reflexive obedience" and not just by the tsunami that crippled the plant.
Hundreds in Tokyo protest dropped charges over Fukushima crisis
Photo: EPA
Hundreds rallied in Tokyo Saturday to protest Japanese prosecutors' decision to drop charges over the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with no one yet punished nearly three years after the "man-made" disaster. No one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of radiation released when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake crashed into the Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, swamping cooling systems and sparking reactor meltdowns.
However, some Fukushima residents committed suicide owing to fears over radiation, while others died during evacuation. Official data released last week showed that 1,656 people have died in the prefecture from stress and other illnesses related to the disaster three years ago.
"There are many victims of the accident, but there is no (charged) assailant," chief rally organiser Ruiko Muto, 61, told the protesters, displaying a photograph of Kawauchi village which was hit by the nuclear accident.
"We are determined to keep telling our experiences as victims to pursue the truth of the accident, and we want to avoid a repeat of the accident in the future," she said.
Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes around the plant, with scientists warning some areas may have to be abandoned.
"I used to grow organic rice... But I can't do it anymore because of consumers' worries over radioactive contamination," Kazuo Nakamura, 45, a farmer from Koriyama city in Fukushima prefecture, told the rally.
"I want (Fukushima operator) TEPCO officials and bureaucrats of the central government to eat the Fukushima-made rice," he shouted to applause.
A parliamentary report has said Fukushima was a man-made disaster caused by Japan's culture of "reflexive obedience" and not just by the tsunami that crippled the plant.
Hundreds protest dropped charges over Fukushima crisis
TOKYO —
Hundreds rallied in Tokyo Saturday to protest Japanese prosecutors’ decision to drop charges over the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with no one yet punished nearly three years after the “man-made” disaster.
No one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of radiation released when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake crashed into the Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, swamping cooling systems and sparking reactor meltdowns.
However, some Fukushima residents committed suicide owing to fears over radiation, while others died during evacuation. Official data released last week showed that 1,656 people have died in the prefecture from stress and other illnesses related to the disaster three years ago.
“There are many victims of the accident, but there is no (charged) assailant,” chief rally organizer Ruiko Muto, 61, told the protesters, displaying a photograph of Kawauchi village which was hit by the nuclear accident.
“We are determined to keep telling our experiences as victims to pursue the truth of the accident, and we want to avoid a repeat of the accident in the future,” she said.
Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes around the plant, with scientists warning some areas may have to be abandoned.
“I used to grow organic rice… But I can’t do it anymore because of consumers’ worries over radioactive contamination,” Kazuo Nakamura, 45, a farmer from Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, told the rally.
“I want (Fukushima operator) TEPCO officials and bureaucrats of the central government to eat the Fukushima-made rice,” he shouted to applause.
A parliamentary report has said Fukushima was a man-made disaster caused by Japan’s culture of “reflexive obedience” and not just by the tsunami that crippled the plant.
Some 15,000 people whose homes or farms were hit by radiation from the stricken plant filed a criminal complaint in 2012 against the Japanese government and officials of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO).
However, prosecutors in September decided not to charge any of them with negligence over the nuclear disaster.
Campaigners immediately appealed against the decision by the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution, which has the power to order the defendants to be tried.
The committee members comprise 11 citizens who are chosen at random by lot.
But the appeal was made in Tokyo instead of Fukushima, a move campaigners say is “aimed at preventing us from filing a complaint against their decision in Fukushima, where many residents share our anger and grief”.
“We want to share with many people in Tokyo our anger and sadness over the fact that no one has taken responsibility three years after the accident,” one of the organizers, 43-year-old Miwa Chiwaki, told AFP.
“We pin our hopes on sound judgement by people in Tokyo,” Chiwaki said.
Campaigners allege that government officials and TEPCO executives failed to take necessary measures to shield the plant against the March 2011 tsunami.
They also hold them responsible for a delay in announcing data predicting how radiation would spread from the facility in the aftermath of the accident.
But prosecutors decided to exempt all of them, saying that TEPCO and government officials could not predict an earthquake and tsunami of that size, and there was nothing wrong with their post-quake response under unexpected emergency situations.
Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer representing the campaigners, said “there were lots of measures that officials could have taken to prevent the disaster.”
“We won’t give up indictment of the officials,” he said.
Campaigners last year filed a separate complaint to prosecutors over TEPCO’s handling of increasing waters contaminated with radiation after used for cooling the stricken reactors, accusing them of committing pollution-related crimes.
Separately, TEPCO officials and senior government officials face several civil lawsuits that were filed by thousands of plaintiffs seeking compensation for mental and financial damage, demanding full restoration of the pre-accident environment in their hometowns.
The waves created by the tsunami swept more than 18,000 people to their deaths across the country and destroyed entire communities.
( Wait until the folks in Japan really learn what has gone on..... you'll see hundreds of thousands of folks protesting ! )
Fukushima Cover Up: a Play In 2 Acts
Act 1: Japanese Prime Minister Had to Fly In to Fukushima In the Middle of the Night to Get the Scoop from Low-Level Nuclear Workers … Because Tepco Wouldn’t Tell Him the Truth
In this 27-second video, Amy Goodman summarizes her interview with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan:
We just came from Tokyo. We broadcast for three days from Japan. And we’re going to play the interview I did with the former prime minister, the one in charge at the time [of the Fukushima disaster], Naoto Kan. He said it was extremely difficult to get a straight answer from TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, that ran the plants, and he had to fly in. He figured the only place he could get a straight, nonpolitical answer—he flew in the middle of the night to the plant to talk to the workers to figure out whether he had to evacuate 50 million people in Tokyo.
This is not the first time Tepco has been less than honest:
- An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design
- Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment, that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing”, and that there was in fact no real containment at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … insteadpretending that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”
- Tepco admitted that it’s known for 2 years that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean, but covered it up
- Tepco falsely claimed that all of the radiation was somehow contained in the harbor right outside the nuclear plants
- Tepco has substantially under-reported the amount of radiation released at Fukushima
- Tepco – with no financial incentiveto actually fix things – has only beenpretending to clean it up. And see this
Act 2: U.S.Nuclear Authorities Were Extremely Worried About West Coast Getting Hit By Fukushima Radiation … But Publicly Said It Was Safe
Nuclear expert Ed Lyman - chief scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists - said:
While the U.S. government was telling the American people there was nothing to fear from Fukushima and that U.S. plants aren’t vulnerable to the same problems, internally, they were—there was a much different story. So we’ve learned from a lot of Freedom of Information Act documents that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the White House were actually very concerned about the potential impact of radiation from Fukushima affecting not only Americans in Tokyo, which was more than a hundred miles away from the plant, but also Americans on the West Coast. And they were furiously running calculations to try to figure out how bad it could get. But there was no sense of this in what they were telling the public.
Indeed, Seattle residents were exposed to dangerous radioactive "hot particles" because the government didn't warn residents:
This is similar to the Japanese governmentwithholding radiation plume data from evacuating Fukushima residents ... which caused them to evacuate to areas of very high radiation.
EneNews rounds up details on the freedom of information act information.
and more items from Energy News.....
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