After the Fukushima accident, Akira Sugenoya, the mayor of Matsumoto city (a major city in Nagano prefecture, Japan) has been asked frequently to give lectures, because in addition to being mayor, he is also a well-known leading surgeon who has performed many operations on children in Belarus who were suffering from thyroid cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. In 1996, ten years after the terrible accident, he resigned from the hospital he was working for and went to Belarus in order to treat the children because his specialty was thyroid cancer. He stayed there for about five years.
When
he recently gave a lecture for the residents of Fukushima City (the capital of Fukushima prefecture, which has been considerably contaminated even though the city is about 60Km from the crippled plant), he said, "When I came back to Japan from Belarus in 2001, I insisted that such terrible accident could also happen in Japan. I implored the Japanese people to take the accident very seriously and think about it hard. However, at the time, nobody saw the accident as a wake-up call. Everybody seemed to believe that such accidents could never happen in Japan. In this sense, everybody bears some responsibility. Considering the current situation in the contaminated areas in Belarus, I think that the Japanese central government should evacuate all the children in Fukushima city to safe places. Many parents will have to live apart from their children. They will have to accept the situation to protect their children from radiation".
Since the Fukushima accident, some facts have been emerged. Some scientists pointed out the disaster risk and vulnerability of old reactors in the Fukushima plant some years ago. However, nobody took their opinions seriously. I think that nobody wanted to accept the scientists' opinions. On top of that, their warnings weren't widely announced or reported because it's been said that the government wanted to promote nuclear power plant projects. As you can see, general indifference towards nuclear power plants, ignoring warnings and covering up inconvenient information on the part of the government and people involved were indirect factors responsible for the Fukushima accident.
I really hope that a lot of people worldwide can learn from our terrible accident and think about nuclear power plants seriously. Actually, the more I know about energy problems and nuclear power plant projects in the world, the more I find them complicated. I don't intend to elaborate though. All that I want to say here is that I want all the people worldwide to see exactly what is going on in Belarus and Japan, and then think about whether or not to build nuclear plants in their own country.
I recently found the link below on Twitter. This is a blog written by a young Japanese man. He took a bus tour to areas very close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in September. In the blog, he writes about how he felt there as an ordinarily Japanese man. According to the blog, when he visited a museum commemorating the accident, he saw a lot of Japanese writing. First, he thought that this was because of the Fukushima accident. After a while, he realized that it was because of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the terrible accident happened 25 years ago, the victims of the atomic bombs sent messages and tried to help them. On top of that, doctors who had experience in treating the victims of the atomic bombs went to Ukraine and Belarus to help other victims there. When I read the blog, although I know that atomic bombs and nuclear power plants are different, I still had mixed feelings.
The blog is written in Japanese, but there are many pictures.
http://bit.ly/tNlSXR
Pictures of the Fukushima plant
http://photos.oregonlive.com/photo-essay/2011/03/fukushima_dai-ichi_aerials.html
