Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: radiation poisoning

  • The Consequences of Chernobyl

    This article was originally published on Counter Punch

    Monday is the 24th anniversary of the
    Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It comes as the nuclear industry and
    pro-nuclear government officials in the U.S. and other nations try to
    “revive” nuclear power. It also follows the just-released publication of
    a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the
    Chernobyl disaster.

    Chernobyl:
    Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment
    has just been published by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is
    authored by three noted scientists: Russian biologist Dr. Alexey
    Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr.
    Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili
    Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the
    Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of
    Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist
    long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

    The book is solidly based—on health data,
    radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all.

    It concludes that based on records now available,
    some 985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident.
    That’s between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004.

    More deaths, it projects, will follow.

    The book explodes the claim of the International
    Atomic Energy Agency—still on its website – that the expected death toll
    from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book
    shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.

    Comments Alice Slater, representative in New York
    of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: “The tragic news uncovered by the
    comprehensive new research that almost one million people died in the
    toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over
    the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current
    industry-driven ‘nuclear renaissance.’ Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the
    world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the
    true damages caused by Chernobyl.”

    Further worsening the situation, she said, has been
    “the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health
    Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research
    on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA.” WHO, the
    public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA’s claim that 4,000
    will die as a result of the accident.

    “How fortunate,” said Ms. Slater, “that independent
    scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl
    accident.”

    The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set
    up through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of
    atomic energy,” and its 1959 agreement with WHO.  There is a “need to
    change,” it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing
    for the “hiding” from the “public of any information…unwanted” by the
    nuclear industry.

    “An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience
    is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have
    dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe,” it states.

    The book details the spread of radioactive poisons
    following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on
    April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the
    reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were “hundreds of
    millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout
    from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The most
    extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant—in the
    Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and
    Russia.

    However, there was fallout all over the world as
    the winds kept changing direction “so the radioactive emissions…covered
    an enormous territory.”

    The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the
    plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and
    Strontium-90.

    There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by
    maps, of where the radionuclides fell out.  Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and
    Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany,
    Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological
    measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons “fell on Asia…Huge
    areas” of eastern Turkey and central China “were highly contaminated,”
    reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.

    Northern Africa was hit with “more than 5% of all
    Chernobyl releases.” The finding of  Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239
    and Plutonium-240 “in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of
    significant Chernobyl contamination,” it says. “Areas of North America
    were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a
    cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all
    Chernobyl nuclides,” says the book, “fell on North America.”

    The consequences on public health are extensively
    analyzed. Medical records involving children—the young, their cells more
    rapidly multiplying, are especially affected by radioactivity—are
    considered. Before the accident, more than 80% of the children in the
    territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia extensively contaminated by
    Chernobyl “were healthy,” the book reports, based on health data.  But
    “today fewer than 20% are well.”

    There is an examination of genetic impacts with
    records reflecting an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” wherever
    there was fallout. This will continue through the “children of
    irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” So “the genetic
    consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of
    millions of people.”

    As to fatal cancer, the list of countries and
    consequences begins with Belarus. “For the period 1900-2000 cancer
    mortality in Belarus increased 40%,” it states, again based on medical
    data and illuminated by tables in the book. “The increase was a maximum
    in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less
    contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces.” They include childhood
    cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.

    Considering health data of people in all nations
    impacted by the fallout, the “overall [cancer] mortality for the period
    from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was
    estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”

    Further, “the concentrations” of some of the
    poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to
    200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”

    The book also examines the impact on plants and
    animals. ”Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant
    mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply.”

    There are photographs of some of these plant
    mutations. “Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies
    and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic
    disorders, sometimes continuing for many years,” it says. “Twenty-three
    years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole
    spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from
    knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the
    catastrophe.”

    As to animals, the book notes “serious increases in
    morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in
    the public health of humans—increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies,
    decreasing life expectancy…”

    In one study it is found that “survival rates of
    barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear
    power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination,
    annual survival is less than 25%.” Research is cited into ghastly
    abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: “two heads, two tails.”

    “In 1986,” the book states, “the level of
    irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the
    Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of
    times above acceptable norms.”

    In its final chapter, the book declares that the
    explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant “was the worst technogenic
    accident in history.” And it examines “obstacles” to the reporting of
    the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on
    “organizations associated with the nuclear industry” that “protect the
    industry first—not the public.” Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.

    The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F.
    Kennedy’s call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear
    weapons.“The Chernobyl catastrophe,” it declares, “demonstrates that the
    nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our
    environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only
    theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear
    weapons.”

    Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA’s and WHO’s
    dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: “It’s like Dracula
    guarding the blood bank.” The 1959 agreement under which WHO “is not to
    be independent of the IAEA” but must clear any information it obtains on
    issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put “the two in bed
    together.”

    Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book,
    she said: “Every single system that was studied—whether human or wolves
    or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria—all were changed,
    some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”

    In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman
    of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes
    about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts
    of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The
    book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data
    concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of
    people and the environment…The main conclusion of the book is that it
    is impossible and wrong ‘to forget Chernobyl.’”

    In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the
    IAEA-WHO that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl
    catastrophe is among the biggest.

    The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book
    documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.

    And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power
    plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines
    now running—and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led
    by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people
    dead from one disaster.

  • Think Outside the Bomb

    Ladies and Gentlemen:

    My name is Evelyn Ralpho. I am from Rongelap Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

    On behalf of the People of Rongelap, our Local Government, our Traditional Leaders, I am honored to be here and thank the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the organizers and sponsors of this Conference, and especially my mom, Lijon Eknilang.

    In between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear weapons on Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands. The total yield of these tests is equal to exploding one and a half Hiroshima size bombs every day for twelve years.

    The March 1, 1954 hydrogen test, code named Bravo was the most powerful and harmful of the Marshall Island nuclear tests. Bravo was one thousand times as powerful as the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima.

    Bravo caused radioactive fallout to cover the People and Lands of my home.

    The day of Bravo, March 1, 1954 was my mother’s eighth birthday. Like all the residents of Rongelap, my mother was exposed to radiation. The fallout caused radiation burns to all the residents of Rongelap.

    Since that time, my mother has had thyroid surgery. All the Rongelapese who were children at the time of the Bravo explosion have had thyroid surgery.

    Last month, the National Academy of Science released an update on radiation risks. This update, known as BEIR VII, indicates that women are almost 40% more likely to die from radiation cancers, and 50% more likely to have radiation tumors then men. According to BEIR VII, the risks to children are even greater than to women.

    The BEIR VII Report also states that there is no evidence of harm to human offspring from exposure of parents to radiation.

    Having grown up among the Rongelapese, I can attest to the harm that radiation causes to the children of the exposed. As a daughter of Rongelap – the daughter of a survivor, I have personally witnessed the birth problems and birth defects experienced by the women of Rongelap.

    My mother’s health problems are recounted in Dr. Arjun Makajani’s book, Radioactive Heaven and Earth. In that book, she says that she has had seven miscarriages, one of which was severely deformed and had only one eye.

    As bad as the health problems are, recently released documents suggest that the United States scientists conducted human radiation experiments on the Rongelapese. These experiments, known as Project 4.1, were planned before the Bravo blast contaminated my Island. This leads me to believe that the contamination of the Rongelapese was done on purpose.

    After the Bravo test, the Rongelapese were removed from their Island. In 1957, the United States returned my People to Rongelap to live in a highly contaminated environment. The United States scientists came to monitor our uptake of radiation every year.

    Because we no longer wanted to live on a radioactive island, in 1985, the People of Rongelap abandoned our home. We currently reside in exile, scattered throughout the Marshall Islands and the United States.

    Although the United States stopped testing nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, they continue to use it as a military testing ground.

    Kwajalein Atoll, where I grew up on the island of Ebeye, is where the United States currently tests its Star Wars Defense Systems. Missiles fired from the United States are targeted for Kwajalein. Missiles from Kwajalein are launched to intercept the missiles sent from the United States.

    The affects of the Star Wars testing programs on the Marshallese are like the nuclear tests that happened 50 years ago.

    People are displaced from their home islands. Ebeye Island, where the labor force for the Star Wars military base lives, is about 40 acres, and home to about twelve thousand Marshallese.

    On Ebeye, the living conditions are what most Americans would call a slum. Ebeye lacks good sanitation, water, power and medical facilities. The nearby military base has all modern conveniences that are not available to Marshallese citizens.

    The Star Wars tests, like the nuclear tests, continue to contaminate the Marshall Islands with toxic chemicals and depleted uranium.

    The legacy of Bravo and the Marshall Islands nuclear testing lives on in the lives of the children of those who survived exposure to radiation. The disruption that the nuclear testing program caused continues to haunt the lives of the offspring of the survivors of the nuclear testing program.

    As a daughter of Rongelap – a daughter of a survivor, my determination to seek justice on behalf of all people who have been exposed to radiation is strong. My elders sought justice. Now it is time for the sons and daughters of the exposed to seek and fight for justice wherever it may be found.

    That is our quest. That is our goal. That is my promise. With your help, and the help of people everywhere, with the blessing of God, we shall prevail.

    Thank you.

  • My A-bomb Experience and the Spirit of Hiroshima

    In the past, Japan inflicted indescribable suffering and deep sorrow on China and other countries of Asia. Fundamentally, responsibility for war damage inflicted by Japan clearly lies with the Japanese government. I believe that we as individual human beings, however, should not neglect to reflect on this matter. Though I was only a youth, I believe it is essential for me, as a Japanese who was alive at the time, to fully reflect on and etch in my mind the lessons of Japan’s invasion and war and our colonial rule of the Korean peninsula.

    August 6, 1945, I was fourteen years old, in my second year of middle school. I was standing in the schoolyard 1.4 kilometers from the hypocenter with about 150 other students. Suddenly, with a tremendous roar, everything went pitch black. At length, the smoke cleared and I could see the schoolyard again. I had been blown backward about 10 meters by the blast. My classmates toohad been blown forward, backward, left or right. They were fallen and scattered all around. The school building was a low pile of rubble. The surrounding houses had also vanished. Except for a few large buildings in the distance everything had vanished. For an instant I thought, “The whole city’s gone!”

    As I came to my senses, I examined my own body. My uniform was burned to shreds. I had serious burns on the back of my head, my back, both arms, and both legs. The skin of both of my hands had peeled off and was dangling down on strips, revealing raw, red flesh underneath. Pieces of glass were protruding from my body in several places. Suddenly, I was attacked by an unfamiliar sense of horror. In a matter of minutes I was heading for the river as fast as I could go. Not long on my way, I heard someone calling my name. Looking around, I saw my classmate Tatsuya Yamamoto. We used to walk to school together every day. Now, he was seeking help, crying, “Mama, Mama…help me!” I said, “Stop crying! We just have to get out of here!” And with me alternating between scolding and encouraging, we fled together toward the river.

    I saw a line of survivors looking dazed, dragging their legs wearily and pressing toward me. Their peeled arms dangled oddly in front of them, and their clothes were in tatters. Many were virtually naked. I couldn’t even see them as human; I felt I was watching a grotesque procession of ghosts. I saw one man with hundreds of glass shards piercing his body from the waist up. The skin of another man had peeled off his entire upper body, exposing a mass of red flesh. A woman was covered in blood, one eyeball grotesquely dangling out of its socket. Next to a mother whose skin had completely peeled off lay a loudly crying baby, its entire body burnt. Corpses were scattered everywhere. A dead woman’s internal organs had burst out onto the ground around her. It was all so utterly gruesome, a living hell indescribable in words. We continued to head resolutely for the river.

    But all the streets and pathways leading to the riverbank were blocked by the wreckage of toppled houses. It often seemed impossible to get through. In a mindless state of utter desperation we crawled on all fours over and through the ruins until at last we managed to find the river. Luckily, just where we emerged on the bank we found a small wooden bridge that had miraculously withstood the blast.

    Then it happened, just as we were stepping out onto the bridge. Tongues of fire burst violently out from the collapsed houses on both sides of the street. As we stood and gaped, the whole riverside transformed into a sea of fire. Crackling loud as thunder, towering pillars of fire shot up towards the heavens, like the eruption of a volcano. Fortunately we were beyond the reach of the conflagration, but my friend Yamamoto had somehow vanished.

    Finally I escaped to the other side of the river where there wasn’t any fire. Having reached relative safety, the intensity of my flight subsided somewhat, and I was suddenly aware that my whole body was burning hot. To ease the pain I went down to the river, dipping myself three times. The cool water of the river was to my scorched body an exquisite, priceless balm. “Ah, I’m saved!” And with that thought, for the first time, my tears flowed and would not stop. I came up from the river and was guided to a temporary relief station hastily set up in a bamboo grove. There I received some minimal first aid and rested a while. As I sat there it started to rain, the first black rain I had ever seen. Huge drops that made a big noise when they fell. I just watched, bewildered, thinking, “Is there really such a thing as black rain?” I waited for it to stop, then started walking home.

    After a while, again I heard someone calling my name. I turned and saw Tokujiro Hatta, another friend who used to walk to school with Yamamoto and me. “Takahashi, help me! Take me home with you!” he begged, groaning. For some reason, the soles of his feet were burned so badly that the skin had peeled, revealing the red flesh beneath. He certainly couldn’t walk. Though I myself was seriously burned, I was not the sort to abandon a friend and continue on my way alone. I decided immediately to take Hatta along with me. But how? Luckily, though his feet were burned, the rest of his body had escaped serious burns or cuts. After considering the possibilities for a while, I decided there were two ways to get him home without having his feet touch the ground: one was to have him crawl on his hands and knees; the other was to lean him back on his heels while I supported him. Thus we began our trek, alternating between these two methods. Plodding along slower than cows, step after agonizing step, somehow we managed to help each other along. At one point, overcome by fatigue, we were forced to sit by the road and rest. For no particular reason I looked back over my shoulder. “Hey! Isn’t that my great aunt and uncle? They’re coming this way!” I used every ounce of strength I could muster to shout to them, and they stopped. They were on their way home from a memorial service in the country. Our meeting was a complete coincidence. With their help we made it home.

    Once home, I collapsed in a coma and remained unconscious for three weeks. Later, I was treated by a doctor–an ear, nose, and throat specialist–who came to our house morning and night to see me. Ordinarily, severe burns would not be treated by an otolaryngologist, but with nearly all the doctors and nurses in the city either dead or incapacitated, I was extremely fortunate to receive treatment from any sort of doctor at all. I battled my burns and disease for a year and a half, hovering between life and death. A Japanese saying goes, “Nine deaths for one life, ” and that was precisely my experience. My friends passed from this world with acute radiation sickness: Tokujiro Hatta two days later, and Tatsuya Yamamoto after one month-and-a-half.

    I have survived these many years, but my right elbow and the fingers of my right hand except for my thumb are bent and immobile. Keloid scars remain on my back, arms and legs. The cartilage in my ears deteriorated from the blood and pus that collected there, leaving my ears deformed. I continue to grow a “black nail” from the first finger of my right hand. (You may have seen two samples of this “black nail” that fell off and are on display at the Peace Memorial Museum.) Further, I am afflicted with chronic hepatitis, a liver infection that is a nationally recognized aftereffect of the bomb. I have been hospitalized ten times since 1971. Besides my liver problem, I am afflicted with numerous other ailments and cannot help but constantly worry about my health.

    While struggling with this frail and damaged body, I have often wondered in despair, “Do I really need to live with all this pain?” But each time I have answered, “But you’ve already come so far.” And that thought has kept me going. Of my sixty classmates that day, fifty were cruelly slaughtered by the atomic bomb. To date, I have confirmed the survival of only thirteen of us; I am one of the very few still alive.

    “I cannot let the deaths of my classmates be in vain. I must be the voice conveying their silent cries to the generations to come. As a survivor, this is my mission and my duty.” These ideas are engraved on my heart, and I have lived to this day repeating such words to myself continually. My friends were helplessly sacrificed to the atomic bomb without ever reaching adulthood. They died writhing in agony. Their short, young lives abruptly ended. Such enormous sorrow. Such horrible frustration.

    Among humankind’s abilities, it is said imagination is the weakest and forgetfulness the strongest. We cannot by any means, however, forget Hiroshima, and we cannot lose the ability to abolish war, abolish nuclear weapons, and imagine a world of peace. Hiroshima is not just a historical fact. It is a warning and lesson for the future. We must overcome the pain, sorrow, and hatred of the past, we must conquer the argument that the damage inflicted and the damage incurred in the name of war were justifiable, we must conquer the logic that the dropping of the atomic bomb was justifiable. We must convey the Spirit of Hiroshima– the denial of war and hope for the abolition of nuclear weapons–throughout Japan and throughout the world. I sincerely hope you have understood the Spirit of Hiroshima. I will always be praying for your steadfast efforts and progress toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.