Health consequences of the Fukushima accident
Mizue KANNO lived in Tsushima, a village in Namie, the homeland of her family-in-law. She worked in Okuma where the nuclear power plant is located. Following the accident, the family evacuated in unbelievable situation. After living in a temporary accommodation in Fukushima Prefecture, the family moved to West Japan in 2016.
The family’s home in Tsushima is 27 km as the crow flies from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The area is highly contaminated, and is one of the « difficult-to-return” zones. Since then, part of Tsushima has been designated as a « special place for reconstruction and rehabilitation ». Decontamination work has been carried out there, and the evacuation order was lifted on March 31, 2023.
In this episode, Mizue KANNO talks about some health aspects of the Fukushima nuclear accident.
The video of her testimony and its transcription can be found below.
In her testimony, Mizue Kanno talks about Operation Tomodachi and its victims. These are the cases of American sailors, and in particular those who were on board the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to bring aid to disaster-stricken populations following the great earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. They developed serious illnesses after being exposed to radiation, so hundreds of these sailors filed lawsuits to claim compensation from TEPCO. However, in March 2019, a federal judge in San Diego (the home of USS Ronald Reagan) dismissed two class actions. The judge ruled that Japanese, not American, law applied to these claims. In 2021, both the plaintiffs and the defendant jointly filed a motion with the court to withdraw the lawsuits, and on May 20, the court made a decision to accept the motion. There were four similar cases, but this decision brought all of them to an end.
According to the navigation chart compiled from the logbook, the aircraft carrier Reagan appears to be quite far from the Fukushima Daiichi site. However, according to eyewitness accounts, including former Lieutenant Steve Simmons, the precise positions of USS Ronald Reagan are not published for March 12 and 13, 2011. He and his colleagues saw the coastline and snow-capped mountains. Petty Officer 3rd Class Daniel Hair told Stars and Stripes that he was informed the Reagan came within “5 to 10 miles off the coast from Fukushima.”Stars and Stripes also reported that “many sailors have disputed the Navy’s accounting, saying they were so close that they could see the plant. »1.
For context, we publish here the navigation chart of the USS Ronald Reagan (contested accuracy of its positions according to witnesses), as well as the image of the movement of radioactive plumes emanating from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
created by NPO Peace Debo and published in Hyôryû suru Tomodachi2
Consulted by Nos Voisins Lointains 3.11, Cindy Folkers gave her comment. She is the radiation and health risk specialist at Beyond Nuclear, which advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic. She shared her comments with us below:
“What struck me was a consistency between people who could have been exposed to radiation: the metallic taste. Those at Three Mile Island reported it, Operation Tomodachi and also Mizue Kanno in her video. In my humble opinion, this should be regarded as an indicator of exposure, especially since many claiming this phenomenon would not necessarily expect to associate it as such. Radiotherapy treatments for cancer sometimes cause this taste but no source is sure whether this is due to destruction of brain cells or alteration of taste buds. Surfers at San Onofre3 have been reporting it as well. Not sure why this occurs, but it is a consistency for higher dose radiation exposures — consistent, but not universal.”
There are other parallels between these American sailors and Fukushima victims:
According to testimonies, many of the sailors were obliged to sign a paper declaring that they had taken a pill of stabilized iodine, whereas they hadn’t. The Japanese authorities also did not give the order to distribute iodine pills which would have protected the population from I-131 at the first stage of radioactive fallout. Many Fukushima victims and sailors developed severe symptoms and many of them died. The authorities in both cases, at many different levels (administrative, legal, etc.) abandoned them to their own fate.
Transcription
When we arrived in Osaka after the evacuation, we were told that because of our evacuation, the contamination was spreading via the freeway and would spread to the Osaka region. And my friend refused to see me. She said she couldn’t see me for fear of exposing herself to radiation.
« Oh, I’ve turned into a rotten orange! »
I said to myself. It was then that a friend and former neighbor from Tsushima village contacted me. The situation in the shelters was tough and everyone was exhausted. She called me to get me to come back to help. I thought I belonged where people needed me.
My son was young so I asked family members to keep him and I returned to Fukushima leaving my son and the dog.
The road to Fukushima is dotted with nuclear power plants. Fukui and Niigata prefectures… I was traumatized by the sight of nuclear power plants. So, I went back to the shelter where we’d been welcomed after leaving Tsushima, in just 8 hours on a journey which normally takes 12 hours with breaks.
There I found truly courageous people. Let’s help each other. We’re not going to give up. So, people looked after each other and helped each other in the shelter. I was really happy to be back. I had things to do there, and that was essential for me. I stayed there until mid-April, when the shelter was converted for fragile people.
At first, everyone had severe diarrhea. We got diarrhea just from drinking water even though we hadn’t caught any virus. We didn’t have a stomachache. We just had diarrhea, as if we wanted to expel something from our bodies. They suspected gastroenteritis. We disinfected the whole area, and we took medication but it didn’t stop the diarrhea.
I thought they might be reactions to radiation exposure when I heard about the USS, the Reagan. These are the crew members of this aircraft carrier who had been delivering relief supplies to disaster victims caused by the tsunami and nuclear accident under Operation Tomodachi.
These people filed a lawsuit in 2017. When I read their files, I realized that we shared the same experiences. In their testimonials they said the air always tasted like licking aluminum foil. And that they experienced tingling sensations with rashes on their skin. And they had diarrhea all the time.
I think they had the same symptoms. The same testimonies were collected at the Three Mile Island accident. And during the Chernobyl accident too.
The Japanese government claims that no casualties resulted from the nuclear accident.
Is that true?
The deaths of people working in the plant’s premises were treated as work-related accidents, but the link between these deaths and the nuclear accident has not been recognized.
9 crew members of the Ronald Reagan died before 2017. And 23 people developed cancer.
I thought it was the same as us. But the Japanese government refused to recognized the link with the Fukushima accident.
The United States Marines investigated the matter, but denied any relation to radioactive exposure.
People on deck were not skilled workers but rather sailors and people washing the returning helicopters. These were people who were constantly on deck. These young people fell one after the other. Perhaps they shared the same fate as us who remained outside unprotected.
There are now young people who say that the nuclear power plant is safe, that it is necessary to fight global warming.
Is that the case?
The first step in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Japan is to draw up an evacuation plan without which the plant cannot be operated. We need an evacuation plan for residents within a 30 km radius. Why do they need to be evacuated? Because of the exposure to radiation.
We too were evacuated after the nuclear accident. This evacuation route is an evacuation trail by which we cannot return to our homes. Evacuation takes place on a one-way street. You can never go home again. Power generation that leads to such an evacuation, is it really justified?
At the time, TEPCO declared that one in 7 people would develop cancer and that nuclear power plants could not be the cause of cancer. But as we were displaced in just 5 years, one person in 5 had developed cancer. At present, one person in 3 died of cancer. One person in 2 will develop cancer. This is the kind of age we live in, say insurance companies. How can mortality and morbidity increase in this way, from an epidemiological point of view in just 7 years? I believe the cause is the nuclear accident.
Only 12 years after the nuclear accident, our government has declared that it would allow nuclear power plants to operate for up to 60 years. It also declared to build new nuclear power plants. But humanity hasn’t found the answer to the question of what to do with nuclear waste. I want young people to understand that it’s nuclear waste that is more terrifying than global warming, and that nuclear power generation continues to produce radioactive waste.
Old people like me are going to die soon. But young people have to inherit nuclear waste and live with it.
Currently, our government is trying to dump an ever-increasing quantity of contaminated water into the sea as a result of the nuclear accident. It’s a question that concerns all of you, you and your countries. Our government says there’s nothing to worry about because once in the ocean, water is diluted. But the dense mass of radioactive materials will they not dilute, but drift in mass, then be absorbed by seaweeds and fish, then by the birds that eat them, and finally end up on our tables?
I don’t trust this country where such things are done with complete impunity and I want everyone to know that it’s really dangerous. We continue to fight against it here in Japan, but please raise your voices all over the world saying to the Japanese government that contaminated water must not be discharged into the sea, and that the project must be stopped.
When I left Fukushima Prefecture in 2015, I was told there was no risk of cancer. Then, in 2016, I was diagnosed with cancer which couldn’t be left untreated and risked metastasis. Thyroid cancer. They always told me not to worry about thyroid cancer, because women were affected very frequently, but they told me it was a cancer that had to be treated immediately. I had surgery to remove it. I wanted to have my thyroid removed to check for radioactive substances. But they told me that the cancer in my body was mine, but that what they had removed belonged to the hospital. So, I couldn’t have it. I thought if we looked into it, even if the iodine had already disappeared if there were other nuclides, such as cesium we might find a cause-and-effect link with cancer. But I couldn’t have it.
Today, I’ve lost friends due to leukemia and thyroid cancer. People younger than me are dying of cancer. This has never happened before. 5 people who were from the same place as a friend who died of leukemia, 5 people living in the neighborhood contracted leukemia one after the other. And a year later, they all died. These people were from a locality further away from the power plant than we were where I settled after the evacuation, but they washed all the fruit trees with very high-pressure water to remove radioactive substances. And then they peeled by hand all the bark from the persimmon trees from which radioactive materials could not be removed. These are the people who have been exposed to the splashes.
I still think it’s an exposure to radiation. But the State does not recognize the causality link. I think it’s because if they admit it, it will affect their nuclear policy.
- https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/07/injustice-at-sea-the-irradiated-sailors-of-the-uss-reagan/
https://www.stripes.com/news/16-us-ships-that-aided-in-operation-tomodachi-still-contaminated-with-radiation-1.399094
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sailors-exposed-to-fukushima-radiation-seek-their-day-in-court/
also cited in Hyôryû suru tomodachi (see the footnote 2) ↩︎ - Hyôryû suru tomodachi ( Soldiers Left Behind ), Aimee L. Tsujimoto and Masato Tainaka, Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc, Tokyo, 2018 ↩︎
- San Onofre is near San Diego, California, the home of the USS Ronald Reagan. It is near a closed NPP Southern California Edison (SCE). The owners of the shuttered plant use a system called “Dilute and Discharge,” to dump radioactive water from its spent nuclear fuel pools into the Pacific Ocean. See the link of the report which follows in the text. ↩︎
Nos Voisins Lointains 3.11 