H/t reader M.G.:
“This article related how communities around the world, including Fukushima, find the people to deal with nuclear disasters. Terrifying.”
BBC, ‘Windscale – Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster’ (emphasis added) — Tom Tuohy, deputy manager at Windscale plutonium production plant (at 8:00 in): “We were trying to push the burning fuel into the back of the reactor.” — But the heat had melted the cartridges, so they were stuck in the core… Radiation was so intense they could only work a few hours. They were running out of firefighters. — Neville Ramsden, Windscale health physicist: “The police from the [plutonium] factory had turned up looking for volunteers and they brought a bus. They decided the best way to get the volunteers was to go up to the cinema, and ‘volunteer’ the back 2 rows at the show to go… push the fuel rods out of the reactor.”
Yorkshire Television, ‘Children of Chernobyl’ (at 4:00 in): “When the robots broke down because of the extreme radioactivity, men were sent in to cleanup the site. They were not volunteers. They were picked up off the streets and press ganged [i.e. taken by force] onto the roof… In 90 seconds, they received their permissible lifetime dose of radiation. The men were sent home and forgotten… They do not figure in any official casualty lists.”
Prof. Kate Brown, C-SPAN (at 35:00 in): “When there was an accident [at Hanford], when there was some dangerous ground that needed to be worked… they sent in these temporary workers, prisoners from the camps nearby… minority laborers… basically ‘jumpers’ to work in dangerous ground, unmonitored… and they’d leave with the many possible radioactive isotopes they had ingested… without any epidemiological trace… The plutonium cities presented a picture of healthy pink populations, this was a mirage.”
Prof. Brown (at 42:30 in): “That job [of refining plutonium] was often given to women… it’s one of the dirtiest jobs. At Dupont… they’d write the Army Corps, ‘Maybe since we’re going to make this super-poisonous product, we shouldn’t hire women who were younger than the menopausal age. What about fertility problems? What about mutants and monsters in offspring?’ They were real nervous about it… they knew a great deal, and they were worried.”
DC Bureau: When the enormous problem of high-level nuclear waste became apparent… White workers ordered African Americans to deal with this deadly mess, and disposal involved dumping plutonium straight into the soil…. [Mr. Lindsay] was recruited from his job as a segregated school principal to commute several hours from Greenwood, South Carolina… like thousands of other African American workers, was given the most dangerous jobs and ordered to throw his dosimeter… in a bucket before going into high risk areas.
Reuters: Police say Japanese gangsters rounded up homeless men to clean up Fukushima radiation… “Many homeless people are just put into dormitories [and] left with no pay at all.”
Anand Grover, United Nations Special Rapporteur (at 15:30 in): “These [Fukushima] workers told me, ‘Do you know we’re actually living in a shanty town?’… Literally on the pavement… in Tokyo… They told me that people come take them.”
Channel 4, ‘Nuclear Ginza’ (1995) — Prof. Kenji Higuchi (at 2:00 in): “The scenes I saw, the stories I heard, I found them difficult to believe at first… Workers go near the reactor and get exposed… Many of them become ill… sometimes die… [They’re] picked off the street in the slums… I found so many… who didn’t know what had happened to them, or if they did, too frightened to speak… all their stories were the same… People simply don’t believe this could happen in a country like Japan… It’s as if they’re the living dead.”
Watch: Windscale | Chernobyl | Hanford | Japan Pre-Fukushima | Fukushima
This is a story we must not forget continues unabated and unresolved in Fukushima. Japan has gone from the strongest saving and lending nation in the world to one mired in debt with a debt to GDP quickly approaching the deadly 100%.
Fukushima has destroyed Japan, and God alone knows how many people they have pulled from the streets of Tokyo thanks to the gangsters to work and die in the reactors. Gangsters took those who could not pay their debts, sent them to Fukushima, and left them to die in the shanty town that used to be inhabited by citizens in the days before March 11, 2011…..now just shacks.
Japan has used convicts, homeless people and others existing on the edges of life and promised them wages and decent livings that never materialized.They have never accounted for the number of dead from Fukushima. The silence has been deafening…..the entire world has helped them shut up any truth telling.
The story is hopeless, it is truly a doomsday scenario, and it is painful to follow. We MUST not let it drop into yesterday because it is here today and tomorrow. This site has been one of the few to stay on it, and we must do our part to pay attention.
Thanks for posting it. Here on the west coast in CA, our sea life is dead, barnacles cover our beaches instead of beautiful sea shells……the white sands and beautiful days spent on our beaches are no more. We warn our friends to stay away from the ocean, it is now radioactive, and nothing can reverse it. Dolphins, whales, sea life of all kinds are now poisoned and/or dying off. For those of us who have such wonderful Summer memories of Southern CA or Santa Cruz…….it is a tragedy……..