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radiation
Hiroshima Survivors Warn Against Nuclear War 79 Years After US Bombing
"The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," said one hibakusha. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they?"
Aug 06, 2024
As the number of people who survived the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rapidly dwindles 79 years after the attacks, hibakusha—the Japanese word for the survivors—and others are imploring humanity to do everything possible to avert another nuclear war.
"People still don't get it. The atomic bomb isn't a simple weapon. I speak as someone who suffers until this day: The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," Shigeaki Mori, who was an 8-year-old boy on his way to school on the morning of August 6, 1945,
toldThe New York Times. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they? I wish for the day they stop that."
Keiko Aguro was also 8 years old and standing on a road near her home in Hiroshima when a U.S. B-29 Superfortress dropped one bomb over Hiroshima that exploded with the force of 16 kilotons of TNT. The explosion destroyed nearly everything and everyone within about a 1-mile (1.62 km) radius. As many as 90,000 people died from the heat, blast wave, and ensuing inferno. Tens of thousands of others were injured, many of them mortally. Tens of thousands more would perish from radiation over the following weeks, months, and years.
"As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story," Aguro said. "'For we shall not repeat the evil'—this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it's difficult to imagine."
"Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven," Aguro added. "I heard many survivors say, 'What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I'll meet my daughter I couldn't save. I'll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?' There is no answer I can tell them."
Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was obliterated in a 20-kiloton air burst that killed as many as 75,000 people that day, with a similar number of people wounded and tens of thousands more dying later from radiation.
The authors of the Times piece—Kathleen Kingsbury, W.J. Hennigan, and Spencer Cohen—wrote that "as another anniversary of August 6 passes, it is necessary for Americans—and the globe, really—to listen to the stories of the few human beings who can still speak to the horror nuclear weapons can inflict before this approach is taken again."
However, they note that "countries like the United States, China, and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles," while "many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening."
"The threat of another blast can't be relegated to history," the trio wrote. But they added that nearly eight decades later, many Americans still hail the bombings as "necessary and heroic acts that brought the war to an end."
But the prevailing U.S. historical narrative—which portrays the bombings as critical to ending the war—ignores the lack of consensus and grave misgivings among senior military commanders about dropping the bombs. Seven of the eight five-star generals and admirals at the time opposed its use. One of them, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said as president that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—marked this year's ignominious anniversary with a report focusing on how children are affected by nuclear war and the threat thereof.
The report contains graphic descriptions of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and of nuclear weapons testing on children around the world. It also explains how fear of thermonuclear annihilation affected children during the Cold War and how humanity can protect children by disarming.
"Today, several thousand nuclear weapons still exist in the arsenals of nine countries, posing a unique existential threat to people everywhere, especially children. Many have vastly greater explosive yields than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the ICAN report states.
"To protect humanity from the catastrophic harm that nuclear weapons are designed to inflict, governments must act with urgency to eliminate them completely—the only guarantee against their further use and testing," the publication continues. "This would be a great service to the current generation of children and to all future generations, who would grow up free from the threat of nuclear war."
"The alternative is to pass on to them a world still teetering on the brink of catastrophe," ICAN added. "Or, quite unthinkable, a world reeling from the horrors of another nuclear attack, perhaps with a death toll orders of magnitude greater than that of the atomic bombings of 1945."
Echoing ICAN, Hiroshima Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki said during the annual commemoration of the bombing at Hiroshima Peace Park that "as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will surely be used again someday."
"Nuclear weapons abolition is not an ideal to achieve far in the future," Yuzaki stressed. "Instead, it is a pressing and real issue that we should desperately engage in at this moment since nuclear problems involve an imminent risk to human survival."
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Thousands of Liters of Radioactive Wastewater Leak in Fukushima Mishap
A Chinese official implored Japan to "face up to the concerns of its neighboring countries and the international community."
Feb 08, 2024
Thousands of liters of radioactive wastewater from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan leaked from the outdoor vent of a filtering device, the company that operates the facility said Wednesday.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said about 5,500 liters of both contaminated and filtered water leaked when a valve was left open during cleaning. The company, which said it discovered the leak on Wednesday morning, warned that some of the water—which is believed to contain 220 times the level of radioactivity required for government reporting—may have seeped into the ground.
"TEPCO has confirmed that there was no significant fluctuation in radiation measurements recorded at the site," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement. "The event does not pose any risk to the public and there is no environmental impact off-site."
The Fukushima plant, located about 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, was catastrophically damaged during the massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused meltdowns in three of the facility's reactors.
Last July, the IAEA approved a Japanese plan to gradually release more than 1 million metric tons of filtered Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific, despite years of warnings from environmentalists and widespread opposition by people in the region.
News of the leak prompted an angry response from the Chinese government.
"Japan's repeated accidents in the process of treating Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water have fully exposed the chaos and disorder of TEPCO's internal management," a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo said on Thursday, according to the South China Morning Post.
"The Japanese government's supervision measures are lacking and ineffective, which once again proves that the nuclear-contaminated water treatment equipment lacks long-term reliability," the official added.
Asserting that "the discharge of the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the sea is related to the health of all mankind, the global marine environment, and international public interests," the spokesperson reiterated calls for Japan to "face up to the concerns of its neighboring countries and the international community."
The new leak follows the October 2023 accident at a separate Fukushima wastewater treatment facility in which four workers were sprayed with radioactive liquid waste while cleaning pipes. Two of the workers were briefly hospitalized for skin contamination, although none showed symptoms of radiation poisoning.
There have been regular demonstrations against the Fukushima wastewater dump in South Korea and China—two countries that, like many others with nuclear power plants, have discharged far greater quantities of treated radioactive wastewater into oceans and other bodies of water than Japan says it will release.
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'San Andreas' Blockbuster Has Huge Radioactive Omissions
Ok. So we don't expect much from these mega-blockbuster disaster films.
But maybe just a hint about reality could spice things up. At least maybe a passing acknowledgement that the actual San Andreas could turn the Diablo Canyon nukes into a seething heap of radioactive rubble and permanently irradiate all of California?
Is that too much to ask, even of Hollywood?
Apparently so.
Jun 06, 2015
Ok. So we don't expect much from these mega-blockbuster disaster films.
But maybe just a hint about reality could spice things up. At least maybe a passing acknowledgment that the actual San Andreas could turn the Diablo Canyon nukes into a seething heap of radioactive rubble and permanently irradiate all of California?
Is that too much to ask, even of Hollywood?
Apparently so.
In a Hollywood high-budget Earth-coming-to-an-end flick like this one, there will always be a lame love story, totally improbable close calls where death is narrowly escaped again and again, and lead characters--male and female alike--with zero body fat who emerge onto the screen fresh from four hours of pumping iron.
San Andreas more than delivers on all of the above. The male lead (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) might be mistaken in some circles for basketball superstar LeBron James, who is six feet eight, 250 pounds--but who leaps like a gazelle and ball handles like a ballerina.
I knew this guy wasn't LeBron because LeBron and the Cavaliers were losing game one of the NBA finals to the Warriors elsewhere in the Bay Area exactly as we watched this.
The Warriors also emerged from that game with an improbable (overtime) victory.
And I hope you appreciate that I missed that memorable contest and suffered through the excruciating, sleep-inducing, occasional laugh-out-loud plot twists of this mega-melodrama to confirm just one thing:
Yes! In fact they did make a super-high-budget disaster movie about the eruption of the San Andreas fault without once mentioning the nuclear power plant that would define it all for generations to come.
In the film two seismologists discover how to predict earthquakes just in time to warn the world that San Francisco is about to shudder and fall.
The destruction of the city is actually a sight to behold. And an awesome tsunami does make an appearance.
Three words do not: Fukushima; Diablo Canyon.
Should we reasonably expect such a real-world accommodation in such a frivolous entertainment?
Here's what we know:
The San Andreas is 45 miles from the two 1,100-megawatt-plus reactors at Diablo Canyon. That's just half the distance Fukushima was from the quake that wrecked at least Unit 1 and sent in that tsunami to finish off Units 2, 3 and 4.
In all likelihood a 9-plus shaking from the San Andreas could reduce the two reactors at Diablo to radioactive rubble. As at Fukushima, we'd expect hydrogen explosions, maybe some fission, the loss of the cores, the cracking of the spent fuel pools, fires, mayhem, and apocalyptic emissions.
Things would be made far worse, of course, because we now know at least a dozen fault lines surround those reactors, and they were not made to withstand them. One, the Shoreline, passes within 700 yards of the two cores. The NRC's own resident inspector, Dr. Michael Peck, has warned that Diablo simply cannot reliably survive those faults going off ... and should be shut.
We also know that all those fault lines are interconnected. There's a hint of that as our scientific expert (Paul Giamatti) shows us how a previously unknown fault line in Nevada could touch off the Big One in California.
In fact, there's simply no way that a shock and tsunami anywhere near as big as depicted in this 3-D IMAX monster would not result in the state being saturated with massive radiation releases from those melted, exploded, rubble-ized reactors. Diablo's radioactive cloud would quickly blanket North America, destroying our food sources and our economy and ultimately killing millions.
None of this, of course, makes it into the film.
The reason is simple: imagine yourself a Hollywood screenwriter depicting extreme bravery followed by happy endings while everyone both on the screen and in the city where it's being shown are massively dosed by a radioactive cloud that will continue to spew for the next, say, thousand years.
Try to envision the dramatic possibilities of watching the vast majority of the nation's fruit, vegetable and nut supplies being hopelessly contaminated, and the land on which they're being grown rendered useless for millennia to come.
Then let's think about the romantic twists of radiation sickness setting in and millions of chiseled Hollywood actors realizing that their lives and those of their progeny have been forever ruined.
Let's throw in a few humorous moments here and there to lighten things up. Plus some flappings of the American flag and a stage right hymn to the exceptional ability of we Americans to "start all over again."
Then, when we've written such a screenplay, let's go get it funded.
So the rumor that San Andreas makes no mention of Diablo Canyon is confirmed. The spent fuel pools at San Onofre, Rancho Seco and Humboldt do not appear. Nor are we reminded that a tsunami far smaller than what the filmmakers roll through the San Francisco Bay would utterly wreck not only Diablo but all the fracking, oil and other extraction rigs along the coast and inland throughout the Golden State, taking the term "pollution" to a whole new level.
At great personal cost, I've confirmed all that. If you like seeing apocalyptic urban destruction and a giant tsunami wave, take in this film. You might want to bring something to read during the dramatic interludes.
But don't count on even a shred of radioactive reality.
And join me to watch Game 2. Unless the Big One does come.
In which case, I guarantee, despite what you won't see in San Andreas ... it will be "Game Over."
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