Japan Beyond Tragedy by Vindal Vandakoff - HTML preview

Chapter

The aftermath

Natsumi never moved out of Mr. Kubo’s house. They were married a year later. Natsumi

gave birth to a baby boy, and Mr. Kubo’s daughters were delighted to have a younger

brother they could dress up in the cutest clothes they could buy.

**

Kenichi and Suzuki became leading advocates in outlawing nuclear power, not only in

Japan, but also around the world. Unfortunately, Kenichi’s children both died of thyroid

cancer. His wife never recovered from their children’s death and took her own life two

years later. Amazingly, Kenichi never suffered any illness from the massive amounts of

radiation exposure. He lived by himself and died at eighty-one.

Suzuki’s wife never returned home, and his son and daughter alienated

themselves from him. He lived alone until he passed away at the age of eighty-six. He did,

however, take a vacation to Hawaii each year.

**

Ryota and Karina finished university and were married a year later. Yurie finished her

children’s book about her adventures on Junk Island and sold over a million copies; she

went on to be a famous children’s books writer.

**

Mackeller and Riona had three beautiful daughters and live a peaceful farming life in

Hitachiota, Ibaraki Prefecture. They stayed very active in the antinuclear movements.

Fortunately, the last part of his dream never came true—up until now.

**

Sachie eventually split up with Tomo and lived with her mother, father, and grandfather.

Her father trained her in kendo, and she went on to win the national titles. She traveled to

many countries for tournaments and exhibitions and eventually married a Canadian and

now lives in Vancouver, where she has her own kendo dojo. Her mother, father, and

grandfather visit her three times a year.

Tomo was too late to go after Yukino as she had married Yuta. Yuta fulfilled his

dream and became a professional surfer. They both travel the world on the Surfing World

Tour and in 2015 Yuta became the first Japanese to win the ASP World Tour.

Tomo continued his seafood export business and married a blonde American

woman. She divorced him a few years later after she found him in bed with her best

friend.

Author’s Afterword

The people of Tohoku have suffered greatly from the tsunami, which washed away whole

towns and livelihoods. My wife and I have visited the town of Otsuchi several times, the

first time just weeks after the disaster. We are truly amazed by the peoples’ spirit and

determination to rebuild their communities.

Japan suffered three meltdowns, but it could have been a much worse disaster with a total

of fifteen reactors affected by the tsunami. The Onagawa, Fukushima, and Tokaimura

plants have a total of fifteen reactors with thirty-six water service pumps used to cool the

emergency generators. Twenty-four of the thirty-six pumps were destroyed by the

tsunami.

Most of the residents of Tomioka town, Futaba village, and the Minamisoma

district still live in temporary housing provided by the prefectural government. They have

moved, on average, four times. Some have been sent to other prefectures, while others

have moved away and started a new life. Most have come to terms with the harsh reality

that they will never be able to return to their homes—not for at least a hundred years. The

people who have stayed suffer mentally and physically. Their farmlands have been

contaminated, and they have no choice but to eat contaminated food and drink

contaminated water. One woman told me she would love to bring her granddaughter to

Fukushima to play in its beautiful nature, but she knows that dream is impossible.

TEPCO, even after a year and a half, has not been forthcoming with

compensation payments. Usually, one needs to fill out a sixty-page claim document with

receipts attached, and accompanying the document is 150 pages of instructions on how to

fill out the document. Many people find the claim form too difficult to understand and

simply give up. It seems TEPCO and the Japanese government are making it as difficult

as possible for the people to claim compensation. TEPCO has tried to escape the

responsibility of the decontamination costs for the radiation that was showered across

Fukushima and other prefectures. Its lawyers claim that the radiation, as well as the cost

of the cleanup, now belongs to the landowners, not the company—not surprising when

one considers the total cost of cleaning up and decommissioning the reactors will be

approximately $600 billion and a further 450 billion yen in compensation for the victims

and businesses. TEPCO is claiming it doesn’t own the radiation that is spread across

Japan, and one can only wonder if they are trying to protect themselves against

international lawsuits, especially from the west coast of America where a lot of the

radiation ended up.

According to the Asahi newspaper, during a deposition to hear demands from the

Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club, located about forty-five kilometers west of the plant, the

golf club argued that TEPCO was liable for the cost of decontaminating the property. But

TEPCO said that they didn’t own the radiation on their golf course and it was now the

golf club’s radiation. The owners said they were utterly shocked by TEPCO’s argument

and were speechless when Tokyo District Court essentially freed the utility from

responsibility.

Compensation should be paid, not only to the victims and businesses in Fukushima, but

also to businesses outside the prefecture, such as the tourist industry that has suffered

severely from cancellation of foreign tourists and food and beverage businesses that have

had export bans slapped on their products. This list goes on, and one can only wonder if

TEPCO and the Japanese government will have the honesty and the guts to properly

compensate the victims and businesses. Much of this is confirmed in a Greenpeace report.

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/lessons-fukushima

The characters in the book are fictional but are based on interviews I have done and

stories I have heard.

Most mobile phones in Japan have an earthquake early warning system that gives a

person a thirty-second warning before an earthquake hits.

Love hotels can be found all over Japan, and almost any room your mind can imagine

exists. Many look like comic castles festooned with neon lights.

Project Seal was a real project undertaken by the New Zealand military to produce a

tsunami bomb. They conducted over 4,000 tests but concluded that the force needed to

produce a tsunami was not possible for them to simulate.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_tsunami37.htm

Nakamaru Elementary School is fictional but is based on Okawa Elementary School,

where seventy-four out of the 108 students perished in the tsunami.

Forty-five firefighters as well as 245 volunteer firefighters were killed while trying to

manually close tsunami gates and evacuate people in Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate

Prefectures.

The Kamaishi breakwater wall was destroyed and is now in the process of being

reconstructed. It did make it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest

breakwater wall in the world, and the song about it is also real. The city used to be the

capital of steel production but has been struggling in recent years.

The small fishing town of Ryoshi and Kariyado were both wiped out by the tsunami that

was deflected off the Kamaishi breakwater wall. Witnesses say the wave double in size to

twenty-one meters.

The Asian Symphony is a real 170,000 tonne freighter and was washed into the city of

Kamaishi and was still there the last time I visited the city.

If you were to calculate the length of all Japan’s breakwater walls, it works out to be

longer than the Great Wall of China.

The tsunami created around twenty-five million tonnes of debris of which, by March

2012, only 5 percent had been disposed. It’s impossible for Fukushima, Iwate, and

Miyagi Prefectures to incinerate all of the debris themselves. They have asked other

prefectures to help with the disposal, but many are reluctant because of fears of radiation

contamination.

A total of 15,845 people were killed, mostly drowned. Another 3,155 are still missing.

Kasagiyama (island) recorded the highest tsunami at forty-three meters.

There wasn’t just one tsunami. Tsunamis continued hitting the coast all through the night

of March 11, although most were relatively small. The tsunami warning was not lifted

until late in the afternoon the following day.

The Tohoku and Kanto areas, especially Fukushima and Ibaraki Prefectures, have had a

total of 2,705 earthquakes with magnitudes above 4.5 as of August 22, 2013. (That

doesn’t include quakes below 4.5 because it would be around 10,000 to 20,000.) To

watch the earthquake monitor, Google Japan quake map.

It is well-documented that the Japanese prime minister’s interference and bad decision-

making contributed greatly to the nuclear accident. The visit of the Japanese prime

minister to the Daiichi plant on the morning of March 12 has been criticized by many and

has been blamed for the delay in venting the Number One reactor, which led to the first

explosion. This is a debatable point, considering there were two similar explosions over

the next few days in which they had ample time to vent.

A recently released independent report, which condemns the gross mishandling of the

nuclear accident, cites TEPCO’s refusal to allow any of its workers to be interviewed for

the report.

The results from a test done at the Brunswick plant in North Carolina on a reactor similar

to the Mark 1 BWR had been known for over forty years, though nothing was done to fix

the problem. In the 1970s, one of the chief designers of the Mark 1 BWR resigned from

the company in protest. He said the Mark 1 containment was not safe enough to use. The

venting system was added to the design in the 1990s after they discovered there could be

a hydrogen explosion; this is after the reactors had been in use since the 1960s. The other

defects in the design, such as the torus and reactor vessel being prone to melt-throughs,

were all common knowledge in the nuclear industry.

America has twenty-three similar reactors operational, all with the Mark 1 containment

vessel. Many are operating with extended lives. I have listed them below.

•

Browns Ferry 1, Athens, AL, operating license since 1973, reactor type GE 4.

•

Browns Ferry 2, Athens, AL, 1974, GE 4.

•

Browns Ferry 3, Athens, AL, 1976, GE 4.

•

Brunswick 1, Southport, NC, 1976, GE 4.

•

Brunswick 2, Southport, NC, 1974, GE 4.

•

Cooper, Brownville, NE, 1974, GE 4.

•

Dresden 2, Morris, IL, 1970, GE 3.

•

Dresden 3, Morris, IL, 1971, GE 3.

•

Duane Arnold, Palo, IA, 1974, GE 4.

•

Fermi 2, Monroe, MI, 1985, GE 4.

•

FitzPatrick, Scriba, NY, 1974, GE 4.

•

Hatch 1, Baxley, GA, 1974, GE 4.

•

Hatch 2, Baxley, GA, 1978, GE 4.

•

Hope Creek, Hancock’s Bridge, NJ, 1986, GE 4.

•

Monticello, Monticello, MN, 1970, GE 3.

•

Nine Mile Point 1, Scriba, NY, 1969, GE 2.

•

Oyster Creek, Forked River, NJ, 1969, GE 2.

•

Peach Bottom 2, Delta, PA, 1973, GE 4.

•

Peach Bottom 3, Delta, PA, 1974, GE 4.

•

Pilgrim, Plymouth, MA, 1972, GE 3.

•

Quad Cities 1, Cordova, IL, 1972, GE 3.

•

Quad Cities 2, Moline, IL, 1972, GE 3.

•

Vermont Yankee, Vernon, VT, 1972, GE 4.

Japan has seventeen Mark 1 reactors. They can be found at the nuclear power plants listed

below.

Higashidori Aomori

Onagawa Miyagi

Fukushima Daiichi

Hamaoka Shizuoka

Shiga Ishikawa

Shimane Shimane

Tsuruga Fukui

Just five days after accident, on March 16, the NRC extended the life of the Vermont

Yankee reactor in Vermont for another twenty years, but this has now been reversed and

the extension revoked.

The Japanese central government didn’t give the go-ahead for the distribution of iodine

pills until five days after the accident. However, the towns of Tomioka and Futaba

distributed them without waiting for Tokyo’s permission. Similar action was taken by

officials in Iwaki city and the town of Miharu.

People from around the Fukushima plant were evacuated far too late. The evacuation zone

should have been expanded to at least eighty kilometers, as the IAEA suggested. Some

people were evacuated from safe areas to highly radioactive areas. This was due mostly to

the Japanese government’s withholding of SPEEDI information from the public. SPEEDI

is the system that predicts the dispersion of radiation based on wind and terrain.

The public, including women and children and especially young girls who are five to ten

times more susceptible to radiation than their male counterparts, were unnecessarily

exposed to high doses.

Many children, again more girls than boys, experienced nosebleeds during the first two

weeks of the accident; some continued into May.

The metallic taste was common in the mouths of the people in Fukushima for the first two

weeks after the disaster.

In some areas of Fukushima children are not allowed to play outside or are restricted to

forty-five minutes a day.

Greenpeace did its own monitoring on the ground straight after the accident, even before

the IAEA. These results were given to the IAEA, who were going to give the information

to the Japanese government. Two days later, the IAEA changed its mind and said it

wasn’t necessary. This was probably due to pressure from the Japanese government. If

the Japanese authorities had used this information, the evacuation of some residents to

higher radioactive areas wouldn’t have occurred. Some residents were left in these highly

radioactive areas for a month.

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/lessons-fukushima

The Japanese government didn’t release the SPEEDI data until April 25—more than a

month after the disaster.

The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was prohibited to come closer than thirty-two

kilometers from the coast.

The report from the US attributing 14,000 infant deaths to the Fukushima accident is true.

The article is MEDICAL JOURNAL ARTICLE: 14,000 US DEATHS TIED TO FUKUSHIMA

REACTOR DISASTER FALLOUT

http://www.radiation.org.

Japan has not released any infant mortality rates from Fukushima for the last ten months.

The closure of radiation monitoring stations on the west coast of America and Canada just

a week after the accident was totally irresponsible. They had detected radiation levels

hundreds of times higher than usual as well as xenon and krypton measuring 40,000

times above the normal level.

It is true that they tested 3,000 children in the village of Itate for thyroid cancer and found

lumps in 1,000 of them. Further tests done in Fukushima found that 36 percent of

children had lumps in their thyroids. Recent data revealed that 43.7 percent of children in

Fukushima city have nodules or crystals in their thyroids and 58 percent of all children in

the prefecture.

The BEIR V report is true and stresses long-term exposure to low doses of radiation is

more dangerous than a short high dose.

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/cancer-risk-young-children-near-fukushima-daiichi-

underestimated

The spreading of radiation throughout Japan by burning contaminated debris is true. The

radiation level in Kobe city rose sharply just after they began incinerating debris. The

dumping of radioactive ash in Tokyo as landfill is also true.

The London Convention that prohibits the dumping of nuclear material into the oceans

was signed by Japan in 1975. Japan seems to think that Tokyo Bay is not part of the

ocean.

Firefighters were sent in to hook up water with no protective clothing. I remember when I

saw it on TV. My first comment was why aren’t they wearing any protective gear?

Several elderly people were found starved to death months later in the no-go zone. In

Futaba Hospital, bedridden patients were left bedridden for three days without food or

water. They were then sent to a shelter that had no medical structure. Out of the 440

patients from Futaba Hospital and a nearby nursing home, forty-five died.

As of June 2012, 537 deaths have been certified as nuclear disaster-related by thirteen

municipalities. A disaster-related death certificate is issued when the death is determined

to be indirectly related to the disaster.

The nuclear industry says that there were no deaths caused by the Three Mile Island

accident in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979. Recent research has shown a 10 to 15

percent increase in lung cancer amongst people who were in the vicinity of the plant up to

two weeks after the accident.

The Russian government said that only twenty to thirty firemen died during the Chernobyl

accident, but the military sent in 600,000 men, who were used as liquidators; that means

they were sent to pick up nuclear fuel that lay around the plant and move it to where it

would be buried beneath concrete. These men worked once for five minutes only and

were exposed to huge amounts of radiation. One hundred thousand of them have already

died of cancer. It is estimated that a further one million people have died of cancer related

to Chernobyl.

The Fukushima Fifty are real men who risked their lives to bring the crisis under control.

If it weren’t for those brave men, the crisis would have escalated into an unimaginable

catastrophe. If they hadn’t been able to contain the accident, it would have led to the

evacuation of Tokyo and surrounding areas—around thirty to forty million people.

The reopening of Kawauchi village, just twenty-three kilometers from the Daiichi plant, is

a fact. They intend to reopen kindergartens and elementary, junior high, and high schools.

How much the radiation will spread will depend on how they contain it. Sending the

contaminated debris to other prefectures to be incinerated will not help contain it. The

washing of contaminated houses and roads with high-pressure hoses and allowing the

water to run back into the rivers will not help the spread. Cesium is now being found

hundreds of kilometers downstream in rivers that originate in Fukushima or neighboring

prefectures. Cesium has even been found in the Arakawa River that supplies Tokyo with

drinking water. Fourteen prefectures have been found to have cesium in their drinking

water. Ibaraki had the highest of 0.0112 Bq/kg and 0.0049Bq/kg in Tokyo. Below is a list

of the affected prefectures.

Fukushima

Ibaraki

Tochigi

Gunma

Saitama

Chiba

Tokyo

Kanagawa

Chiba

Nagano

October 16, 2012 the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

(IFRC) determined Fukushima to be an “ongoing humanitarian crisis”.

Compensation by TEPCO and the Japanese government has been suppressed, and the

examples in the book are based on true facts. Recently TEPCO was taken to court by a

kindergarten that is situated ten kilometers from the Daiichi plant. Again TEPCO has

refused to pay for the kindergarten’s relocation. It seems that TEPCO thinks it’s not its

responsibility.

The facts in Kenichi’s speeches are mostly true.

The facts in the book are mostly true. The timeline for the nuclear disaster I changed a

little to fit in with the storyline. The real details of what really went on at the Fukushima

Daiichi plant will probably not be known for years to come. The health effects on the

people will also not be known for some years to come.

Five hundred days after the accident, TEPCO calculated that the Daiichi plant is still

emitting ten million Becquerels per hour of radioactive cesium. In August 2013, TEPCO

admitted that 300 tonnes of radioactive water was leaking into the Pacific Ocean every

day, and has probably been doing so from when the accident started. After they

announced this they upgraded the level of seriousness from a level 1 to a level 3 on the

International Nuclear Event Scale.

On August 7, 2012, the US federal nuclear regulators froze nineteen final reactor

licensing decisions in response to a ruling by the US Court of Appeals. The main reason

for the ruling was that the US has no long-term storage for any of its nuclear fuel. At

present, all spent fuel rods are kept in the spent fuel pools inside the reactor buildings—

most holding four times their capacity. In total the US has 71,000 metric tonnes of spent

nuclear fuel. These fuel pools are located near the top of the reactor buildings and are

vulnerable to aerial attack. These pools hold, on average, five to seven times more nuclear

fuel than the fuel pool in Reactor four at Fukushima.

The facts about the spent fuel pool in Reactor Four are true and very disturbing. The

international community needs to form a special team to deal with this problem as soon as

possible. If the fuel pool collapses or runs dry, the world will be contaminated with

massive amounts of radiation for centuries to come; Japan will be destroyed, and many

parts of the Northern Hemisphere will become too contaminated to inhabit. Although I

said that 200 times more radiation than Chernobyl would be releases, it would probably

be around 10 to 50 times. However, if the plant had to be evacuated and the four other

spent fuel pools caught on fire, we would then be looking at around 100 to 200 hundred

times. TEPCO plans to start removing the fuel rods from Reactor Four spent fuel pool in

November 2013. They plan to do this manually, which has never been done. This is

incredibly dangerous and “criticality” that would result in a chain reaction could takes

place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the

wrong way.

Crewmen from the USS Ronald Regan have filed a Federal lawsuit against TEPCO and

the Japanese Government for withholding data about how much radiation was being

released. The aircraft carrier, which was participating in ‘Operation Tomodachi’ after the

earthquake and tsunami, supposedly sail straight through the plume of radiation fallout.

Please say a pray for the children of Fukushima and the people of Tohoku.

Lastly, you should be aware that an abundance of natural, clean, free energy exists and

has always existed. Ancient civilizations knew about this energy. The circles carved into

the ball under the Chinese Foo Dog’s paw that guards the Forbidden City in China is the

formula to free, unlimited energy. This same pattern can be found represented as the

Hebrew Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the Chinese I Ching. It appears on the floor of

Ephesus in Turkey and the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in India. Thousands of years ago,

this icon was burned into the atomic structure of stone in the Temple of Osiris in Egypt. It

has been embedded into cultures throughout history as symbols, buildings, paintings, and