Children Suffer Nuclear Impact Worldwide

Maggie Gundersen, Chiho Kaneko and Caroline Phillips of Fairewinds Energy Education discuss the nuclear risk concerns for children not only near the nuclear disaster sites of Fukushima-Dai-ichiin Japan and Chernobyl in Ukraine, formerly the Soviet Union, but globally where areas near all nuclear power plants are contaminated with radiation. Since mothers in Japan especially bear the responsibility to protect children, they experience greater hardships in an environment where just expressing one’s concern about radiation is seen as a treasonous act. Even 30 years later, the Belarus government recognizes the merits of relocating children away from radiation contaminated areas but the children of Japan are socially forced to stay put in highly contaminated areas.

Do children suffer worldwide from atomic power? Absolutely. CCTV host Margaret Harrington anchored a panel with Maggie Gundersen, Caroline Phillips, and Chiho Kaneko from Fairewinds Energy Education to discuss the health risks to children around the world from operating nuclear power reactors and their burgeoning waste. In the aftermath of the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, mothers in Japan especially bear the responsibility to protect their children. As a result, they experience greater hardships in an environment where just expressing one’s legitimate concerns about radiation contamination is seen as a treasonous act. Meanwhile in Ukraine, 30-years following the atomic disaster at Chernobyl, the repercussions of massive radioactive contamination and government zoning continue to severely impact children living within 50 miles of Chernobyl’s epicenter. The United States is not immune to these worries and contentions as Tritium, Strontium-90, and Cesium 137 are radioactive releases that threaten the health of children living nearby leaky atomic power reactors and nuclear waste dumps. Learn more by watching this episode of Nuclear Free Future as the women of Fairewinds lend their voices to protect the children. 

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MH: Welcome viewers to on our ongoing nuclear-free-future conversation here at the Center for Media and Democracy here in Burlington, Vermont. I’m your host, Margaret Harrington. And viewers, let’s welcome our guests, all from Fairewinds Energy Education located right here in Burlington, Vermont. This is Maggie Gundersen over here – the founder and CEO of Fairewinds Energy Education; and Caroline Phillips, who is Program Administrator at Fairewinds. And Chiho Kaneko – welcome back, Chiho. You were here a few years ago with a woman from Fukushima, and you’re a board member at Fairewinds Energy Education. Thanks so much for coming. The topic that we have given ourselves is “Children Suffer Nuclear Impact Worldwide.” Now on March 11th of this year – the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima triple meltdown, I heard on the BBC news all about the tsunami with no mention of the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. So what is the impact on children? Because the news media is not talking about this at all.

CK: So in Fukushima specifically? In Japan – it’s misleading to say Fukushima ?1:37 because radiation pollution has impacted practically half of Japan – half of the Japanese islands. But they are monitoring, following the health of children who lived in Fukushima at the time of the disaster. And I think they keep expanding slightly the definition, but let’s say out of – let’s say – 300,000 children who were 18 or younger in 2011, today confirmed 116 thyroid cancer cases, which is statistically quite high. Because prior to that, the Japanese average was 3 in 1 million. So you could say, if you just compare the confirmed thyroid cancer cases among children, which is supposed to be very rare anyway, the jump is 30 times.

CP: We also have to look, too, I was reading how thyroid cancer has now entered the top ten – I think it’s seventh worldwide of most common cancers, which is a very new phenomenon and you have to ask why is that happening as well.

CK: Also, we talk about thyroid cancer mainly because that is basically the only thing that’s recognized by the WHO IAEA as some disease that can be caused by nuclear disaster. However, that doesn’t mean that other illnesses don’t occur. And so, in fact, maybe there are worse things – there are a lot of things that are unreported, undocumented and things happening health wise in a very negative way.

MH: And exactly what is being documented?

MG: From what we’ve seen, very little is being documented and many of the papers are being destroyed after 2 years. They’re keeping medical records for 2 years and then they’re destroying them. And there is a conscious effort and an order to doctors to not talk about any radiation sickness, any radiation-induced issues. When Arnie was in Japan in February, he met a doctor who had a clinic and his clinic was shut down because he either had to say that the people he was treating had no radiation-induced illnesses – if he wanted to be paid he would have to say that – and he refused to say that. So they cut all of his funding for the clinic.

CP: (4:30) And it’s fallen on individuals and people in Japan and abroad for these epidemiological studies. The epidemiological studies that would track these things, like Maggie said, with papers being destroyed after 2 years – it’s really fallen on independent groups to carry on this work. For example, when you look at Chernobyl, we just had – we don’t like to use the term anniversary because it’s not a celebratory thing, but the 30-year commemoration of the meltdown at Chernobyl – we look at the cancer rates of children and people – that we know. So knowing that and knowing that at Fukushima, we’re not keeping these records, it’s pretty lax and it’s pretty devastating.

MH: Are you saying, then, that in Chernobyl they have kept a better record? And are they treating the children, or did they treat the children better? Did they evacuate the children right away in Chernobyl?

MG: No. Like every government that’s faced a nuclear release atomic reactor meltdown or any other kind of pipe break and huge radiation release, they don’t tell the public. It’s just kept under wraps, because the public already doesn’t like nuclear power, doesn’t like atomic reactors, and they would want them shut down if they knew how vulnerable they are to the health impacts.

CK: But Chernobyl was in USSR when it happened, but then the whole reason because Ukraine and then Belarus. Basically Chernobyl was very near the Ukraine-Belarus border. So I can talk about what I heard happen in Belarus is that eventually the government decided to give people the right to move if they lived in an area where the annual dose of radiation exceeds 5 milisieverts. But in Japan, I think the government is trying to – what’s happen in Japan today is that the Japanese government is trying to make people stay in the area even though the radiation level might be as much as 20 milisieverts per year.

MG: Which is so much more than a worker gets exposed to.

MH: And how are they – they’re making people stay there both by convincing them that there’s no danger – right?

MG: In part. Convincing them there’s no danger. And pulling the financial support to evacuate or live in a separate area. Especially with the Olympics coming to Tokyo, they want to – since they’ll be on the world stage, they want everything to appear normalized. It’s a challenging paradigm.

CK: Yeah. And the government’s trying to put a best face on the situation goes hand in hand with the actually victimize the local governments sort of a desperate desire to keep the towns and cities going. So they don’t want their municipalities to disappear. So they basically accept government funding for rebuilding or remediation. Because that’s the only thing that the money is going to go to basically. So that’s a very unfortunate – their priorities, in my mind, it’s wrong.

MH: (8:35) Are you saying, then, that they’re sacrificing the wellbeing of the children for the economic issues?

CP: Right. Even our Fairewinds Chief Engineer, Arnie Gundersen, was recently in Japan and he was visiting some of the women that were living as refuges who had been living near Fukushima Daiichi and are now living in what they’re calling temporary housing but is sort of turning into more than temporary housing. And most of these women had not ever had someone come and talk to them about radiation doses that they might have been exposed to or were exposed to. They’d never been talked to. Most news that they were receiving was –

MG: - A written sheet that came once a month from TEPCO center – written report. But never talked about the radiological issues. And no one told them what’s happening. And they have a certain stipend and the government’s trying to constrain those expenses and move the people back into whatever areas are possible. Again, so that things look like the country is back to normal and everything’s okay. Yet as they collect debris – I mean I’m sure some of your viewers have seen the astronomical piles of what look like trash bags filled with all this debris that’s been cleaned up – allegedly cleaned up. And those bags of debris – first off, they’re beginning to disintegrate. Second off, they’re building incinerators to burn it, and you can never precipitate – a precipitator is a device that’s on a stack, so when you’re burning, to get the particulate out, you’ll never get it out. And especially in the case of radiation. So it’s going to be redeposited. And right now, from the areas that they cleaned, all the rain and flooding and snowmelt has brought all news deposits of radiation down from the mountains. It’s unbelievable.

MH: I know you mentioned Arnie Gundersen, the Chief Engineer at Fairewinds. And he said that he measured the radiation there, too. Could you talk about that a little bit?

MG: He’s working with some other scientists who are studying – both Japanese scientists, the samples that they took, and the US scientists who are evaluating the samples. And they’re finding astronomical amounts of radiation, even in downtown Tokyo outside of METI’s door, and METI is the regulatory agency over nuclear power. So it’s just –

CK: At the ministry of trade and industry and things like that.

MG: And right out – they took – when he and others were downtown in Tokyo, they took samples right there in a garden right outside the door and on the front doormat, and these are really, really high samples. Frightening, because people walking in Tokyo will then be inhaling that dust. What was the film we saw from Japan that had the mothers who were in an area where kids play and run from middle school –

CP: It’s a fantastic video. And I can’t recall the name. It’s a mothers organization. They live in the Fukushima Prefecture. And they’re actually using Geiger counters that have been issued by the government. And they’re walking along the river – and I can’t recall the name of the river. And you see children –

CK: I remember it was in Fukushima City.

CP: In Fukushima City.

MG: And what’s so tragic about it – kids are running along dirt paths doing gym class and track and things like that and the mothers are right down in areas that are not posted and the kids can go after school and play, and people do nature hikes and stuff. And the radiation readings are horrific.

MH: What about the food that the children are eating?

CP: Which is an interesting thing. That’s actually come up recently. The Associated Press did a great expose in Chernobyl discussing children. So in Chernobyl there are four zones. They broke it down into four zones. Zones 1 through 3 have been declared evacuated zones, and the government gave money to people for resettlement and that sort of thing. Zone 4 which is roughly 32 miles from Chernobyl – the nuclear power plant meltdown side – sort of what Chiho was talking about – they’re deemed in a zone that was contaminated, but not enough by government standards. So these people were promised health subsidies. Well, with Ukraine’s economic depression right now, this government funding can no longer happen. It’s dried up.

MG: These kids had free lunch every day – and that was their main meal.

CP: Right. So these kids used to get government funded free lunches that were radiation tested. That’s no longer. So this really – it’s heart wrenching. This expose follows a mother who is feeding her children foraged mushrooms, foraged berries, milk from their cows and they know it’s all contaminated but it’s either that or starvation. So how food and contamination of food – this mother that they’re following, she has 4 children. And one of the sons – I don’t remember if it’s the oldest or not – he’s 8 years old. But they do still get tested. The children still get tested for thyroid issues, and he has an enlarged thyroid. He’s 8 years old. But she said, what choice do I have. So it’s a devastating thing, and we see this 30 years after the Chernobyl meltdown. Fukushima Daiichi is a triple meltdown.

MG: Yeah, that was one plant at Chernobyl. This is three times the radiation.

CK: So I can speak a little bit about Japanese food monitoring. They are testing – they say – and it true, a lot of testing is being done. But especially produce from Fukushima, I think they’re pretty much all tested. However, other areas outside of Fukushima, some places are quite contaminated as well. Those fruits, vegetables are tested as well to some extent, but not as rigorously. They are testing school lunch ingredients, even in my home of Morioka City which is 150 – more than 150 miles north of Fukushima. But they maybe test once a week. So it’s not every day. So I actually know a person, a mother, who lives in Morioka City. She started to notice her children; one was in elementary school, one was in Kindergarten, started to show very unusual health symptoms in the summer of 2011. And eventually she had her children’s urine tested and found – they found fairly high levels of cesium in their urine. And she freaked out. So she tested everything and lobbied the school and then found out that it was the milk that the school was providing. And she begged the schoolteacher to please change the brand of milk. But the Japanese educators, who are sort of a – especially at the higher level, they’re bureaucrats, and they didn’t want to do things to rattle the Board of Education. So they told the mother, we can’t do that, but if you don’t want to have your children consume our school lunch, why don’t you make your kids just bring lunch. It was sort of like a threat, right? Well, she did. And she was a very courageous person. She was driven by protecting her children. And that really helped in the case of her children.

MH: And Chiho, this is at a distance from Fukushima Daiichi.

CK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s just an example, but it kind of highlights how difficult it is to test everything. When I go to the ?18:11, I basically assume I’m probably eating a lot of food that’s contaminated.

MG: That’s what Arnie found when he was there, too. And there was a lot of people who know nothing about radiation. The government has said that everything’s fine for them to be in areas they live in. He was gifted wild boar and they tested it and it was outrageously high.

CK: That’s one of the worst things to eat, yes.

MG: I know. Because the boar forage in all the forests that have so much contamination on the mountains. And it’s just terrible. But these people haven’t been taught, they haven’t been told not to eat that. In parts of Europe, they know, you can’t still – 30 years after Chernobyl, you cannot eat – in Wales, you cannot eat lamb. You cannot eat any of the wild boar in Germany. You have to bring – if you hunt wild boar, you have to bring it and have it tested to see if it’s clean in Germany. They have facilities set up for that. This is like a real denial, the way people exist. Look at the Laplanders, for example. Their reindeer was their diet and it’s still so contaminated, they have to bring reindeer meat into the Laplanders now because the lichen absorb, which the reindeer eat – absorb so much of the radiation – the airborne radiation. We have one of our slogans at Fairewinds is “radiation knows no borders.” Whatever country is building nuclear plants or nuclear weapons or having a reprocessing facility, that’s a danger to all of us around the glob.

CK: (20:07) I don’t know how it was exactly in Chernobyl, but what’s making the situation really complicated and difficult, especially for women, is that if you speak about your concerns, especially your children or whatever, they are in turn attacked by the sort of society at large that they are undermining the recovery effort by bringing unwanted publicity and the reputation to the area. So they are forced to shut up and suffer quietly. And it is very important for women to actually seek each other’s support and some people are really trying to make that happen, but it’s to me heartbreaking that that kind of – just the basic human instinct to protect life is considered to be a treasonous act.

CP: Protecting your children is treasonous.

MG: Arnie saw that clearly – Arnie Gundersen, when he was in Japan, he met a woman who moved with her 3-year-old when the meltdowns occurred. And she moved to an area of Japan that’s way south and there’s no radiation. And the result is now her family and husband are fighting in court to get the child back to an area that’s still contaminated, and saying that she’s crazy because the government tells them everything is okay. So they’re taking her to court to try and get custody of her child.

MG: What you’re describing is a massive government clamp-down on truth, and also that impacts – a triple thing – health, social and economic wellbeing of the children, in particular who we’re talking about now, but the women – everyone.

CP: And as you mention those things, I also think children are the most vulnerable in health and socially. And economically, they don’t have a say. They don’t have a voice.

CK: And they’re more - like 10 times radiosensitive so they suffer more from radiation.

MG: The women are ten times –

CK: Children.

MH: What does that mean, exactly?

MG: Well, the radiation is on the ground. It’s in the air they breathe. They’re closer to the ground. They’re playing in the dust, they’re tying their shoes and getting dirt on their hands and the dirt is contaminated and they touch their fact and their mouth. So they’re ingesting radioactive particles. They’re running and playing in the sand and they’re stirring all this up and they’re breathing it in. They’re just living in a very contaminated world and their bodies haven’t matured yet. So their organs are vulnerable.

CP: Cell turnover is faster.

MG: Everything. Everything. In Chernobyl, with all the cesium, one of the things they diagnosed and found and they track now is Chernobyl Heart – cesium is absorbed in the body just as if it’s potassium. And so cesium is there and it makes the heart develop in different fashion so it doesn’t function right.

MH: Yes. We’re coming to almost the end of our program here, but you haven’t touched on the other things besides the cesium, the tritium, the strontium – to the bones, right? Could you speak a little bit about that? The tritium – is it in the water?

CP: We talk about tritiated water a lot because tritium is – it has the same elements as hydrogen. So it carries the same property as water as we know is H2O. So tritium easily binds with oxygen, creating tritiated water. And we talk about that a lot. Tritium also, like water, binds with air. So we have tritiated air. Also considering life form species, whether it’s vegetation or our own bodies, are typically 3/4ths composed of water. We have organically bound tritium. Once you get to the organically bound tritium – I mean that stays in your body for – Dr. Ian Fairlee said up to 3 years – more than that. I think it was maybe even 5. And Fairewinds has a great podcast with Dr. Ian Fairlee, who specializes in this, but tritium is found in the groundwater at Vermont Yankee. Tritium has been found in ground water at Indian Point. Tritium has been found in – is it groundwater or being released at Biscayne Bay?

MG: It’s come through these canals where it was released from the plant and it’s into Biscayne Bay itself – the ocean.

CP: And Fukushima has huge tritium issues with the amount of water that they’re having enormous problems containing their contaminated water, even with the crazy ice wall that they’re building that costs I think it’s like a third of a billion dollars to create and now leaks 50 tons of this ice-tritiated water every day.

MG: It doesn’t work.

CK:strong> So in Fukushima, I think the problem is the groundwater from the mountain behind those defunct reactors constantly every day seeping into the reactor buildings which are basically melted down – 3 of them. And something like 300 to 400 tons of water every day. So what do you do with that contaminated water that increases by day? They’re putting it into tanks. And I think they have almost 1,000 water tanks – humongous. Something like 800,000 tons of water stored in tanks. And they have equipment to filter out some of the radio nuclides. But tritium is not something that you can – you can’t filter that out. So basically you end up with a massive amount of tritiated water that they don’t know what to do with. And so now discussing whether releasing that into Pacific or evaporating or burying. And none of that option is advisable but they are publicly talking about it. And that’s kind of highlighted the issue of tritiated water, but in fact, tritiated water is all over the world. As long as a nuclear power plant operates, you’re going to create tritiated water. And I don’t know about U.S. but I know in Japan, they’re releasing – those reactors –

MG:strong> (27:30) All of the reactors release tritium every day of operation. So you have the tritiated air and then it gets –

CP:strong> Which can penetrate your skin –

MG:strong> Right. And then it picks up moisture – the air picks up the moisture and comes down, so you have fallout – tritiated rain falling out near nuclear plants – atomic reactors all over the U.S., and nobody’s aware of this.

CK:strong> People might say, what’s the problem with tritiated water?

MG: It crosses the placental barrier, it stays in the body –

CP:strong> When organically bound.

MG:strong> Just regular tritiated water crosses the placental barrier and it hits all the organs and it lodges particles in your organs and before it passes through – the industry claimed it used to be in the body for only 50 days, but Doctor Fairlee has proved that it’s in the body for years. And it’s just there. And so those isotopes will cause changes in the cells. It’ll cause cancers or other illnesses.

MH:strong> What you’re describing is a great – it’s disgusting – tragic –

CP:strong> It’s tragic and it’s hard to wrap your head around.

MH: Yes. And it’s so irresponsible and at the same time, very much plotted out to be this way. So could you please just address this children – the impact of nuclear on children, just for closing remarks now?

CP: Well, I’m 27 years old and I think about issues like tritiated air, tritiated water. I’d love to have kids one day. It’s a terrifying thought to think – I love farmers markets. I love the areas where I live. Have my gardens, have my farmers’ gardens been contaminated with tritiated water? And if that stays in my body for hypothetically 3 or 5 years, what does that mean for my potential children, let alone if there’s a toddler who’s eating carrots that are grown from their garden. And you’re teaching your child, you want to eat fresh foods. But is it safe? But is it safe?

MG: (30:03) And I have grandchildren – one and another one on the way – so it’s a major concern. I want to protect our future generations. And this industry chooses not to do that.

K: And I just feel like people are not given – people since the 1950’s were not given a say in the matter, whether we wanted all this radiation pollution. Well, we don’t want it. That is a clear statement, right? And why shouldn’t it be an okay thing to say? It’s that simple. I mean we don’t want pollution. And so can we start there?

MH: Okay. We start there. And thank you very much, all of you from Fairewinds Energy Education. Thank you viewers, and thank you Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy.