NGO Information Meeting (Japan) in United Nations Office at Geneva Part 2

(Link) http://fukushima-evacuation-e.blogspot.jp/2012_11_01_archive.html 
http://www.nichibenren.or.jp/activity/document/statement/year/2012/121101.html 
(Reference) http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/26544109  (40m-)  
Mr. Toshio Yanagihara, lawyer spoke about the “Fukushima Collective Evacuation Trial.” Through this class action suit on behalf of 14 children, the plaintiffs hope to force the authorities to recognize the legal right of hundreds of thousands of children to be evacuated from the contaminated areas. The fact that children are obliged to eat contaminated food and breathe radioactive air is a violation of the rights of the child. The press is gagged or gives false information provided by the government, which is a violation of the right to freedom of expression and information. 
Mr. Yanagihara and Mr. Yanagihara, a  Mayor of Futuama-machi (3km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plants) urged the Human Rights Council to make recommendations to the Japanese government to give priority to the health of the population specially the children. He ironized that the government applies lessons learned from Chernobyl to avoid the costs of compensation and not to interfere with the nuclear industry: increasing maximum tolerable radiation doses, covering up the diseases already apparent, systematically refusing to take into account the effects of internal radiation, and not establishing statistical control information. Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa showed photos of the new metering equipment installed by the authorities: the machines display 40% less radioactivity than those set to international standards. 
A young Japanese student, Takafumi Honda, representing the " World Network for Saving Children from Radiation ," read children’s letters, including one from a girl from the region of Fukushima who  is worried and asks if she can have children and if they will be normal. Dr. Michel Fernex, professor emeritus of the University of Basel (Switzerland) and member of IndependentWHO, who recently visited Japan, spoke of birth defects that occur after ingestion or exposure to radioactivity: the genome is attacked and anomalies appear. These anomalies are transmitted to subsequent generations. There is already around Fukushima an increase in miscarriages and perinatal mortality, low weight in new-born babies, children with abnormalities of the thyroid gland, sudden death. Cancers appear later, he said. It is imperative that children and pregnant women be evacuated and that healthy food is available to all residents.  
The Japanese also visited the ‘Hippocratic vigils’ of the group "Independent WHO", activists who stand every weekday opposite the WHO’s Geneva headquarters and have been doing so for more than five years,demanding that WHO fulfill its mandate to ensure the highest possible level health for the world’s population. But WHO has no department that deals with the effect of radiation on health. The organisation has abdicated its responsibility and endorses policies of the nuclear lobby, itself supported by the nuclear power. 
The result of the examination will be adopted as a conclusion including views and the advice for Japan in United Nations human rights board of director’s plenary session in February or March, 2013.  Then Japanese government will announce their views and opinions accordingly. 
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I hope the UN will give an appropriate advice to Japanese government this time.  In 1991 Mr. Shigematsu, former head of IAEA visited the contaminated area after the Chernobyl disaster and issued “Safety declaration”, saying that the reasons why children developed thyroid cancer was because of not enough seaweed in their diet, no relation to the radiation.  Ms. Mika Noro who has been helping children in Belarus said that because of his wrong safety declaration UN stopped sending food aid to the contaminated area where people had to grow their own food for financial reasons.  And their children had to go back to eat the radioactively contaminated food.  It took 10 years for UN to admit that it was a wrong judgment.  It was too late.  By then the rate of thyroid cancer in children dramatically increased. We shouldn't allow the same mistake to happen again.

URGENT PETITION to evacuate Fukushima children: http://fukushima-syomei-e.blogspot.jp/

Japan Struggling to Store Radioactive Waste

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/10/2012102510561941251.html

Yuichi Okamura, Leading Nuclear worker says space is running out for contaminated water cooling the Fukushima plants.  Japan's crippled nuclear power plant is struggling to find space to store tens of thousands of tonnes of highly contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of the water treatment team has said.  About 200,000 tonnes of radioactive water, enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools, are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks built around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.  Operator Tokyo Electric Power Company has already chopped down trees to make room for more tanks and predicts the volume of water will be more than triple within three years.

"It's a time-pressing issue because the storage of contaminated water has its limits, there is only limited storage space" the water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told the AP news agency in an exclusive interview this week.
Dumping massive amounts of water into the melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even bigger catastrophe…… Without water, the spent fuel is likely to have overheated and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles and affecting possibly millions of people.
The measures to keep the plant under control itself created another major problem for the utility: What to do with all that radioactive water that leaked out of the damaged reactors and collected in the basements of reactor buildings and nearby facilities……
Masashi Goto, nuclear engineer and college lecturer, said the contaminated water build-up posed a big, long-term health and environmental threat.  He worried that the radioactive water in the basements may already be getting into the underground water system, where it could reach far beyond the plant via underground water channels, possibly in the ocean or public water supplies.  "There are pools of some 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each plant, and there are many of these, and to bring all these to one place would mean you would have to treat hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated water which is mind-blowing in itself," Goto said.  "It's an outrageous amount, truly outrageous" Goto added.  The plant also would have to deal with contaminated water until all the melted fuel and other debris is removed from the reactor, a process that will easily take more than a decade.

Hiroshima Dr. Hida(94 years old) called for abolition of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants in the world at foreign Correspondents' Club in Japan in November 2011

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18530453 13m30s - 

Here is a transcript of his speech:

I was working as the only military doctor in Hiroshima hospital at the time of Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945…..since I have been looking after thousands of Hibakusha (=nuclear bomb victims) for 65 years.  I saw people who had died directly hit by atomic bombs and besides hibakusha developing high fever, and finally died with massive bleeding from their mouths, noses, eyes and genitals, etc.  But what was even more shocking to me was that people who came to Hiroshima afterwards alsodeveloped the similar symptoms and died. I have continued to see patients who had suffered unknown diseases throughout their lives due to the internal exposure to radiation caused by intake or inhalation of radioactive materials into their body.  I believe they are the most prominent victims of this nuclear age.  However under the occupation of US military, General MacCarser made hibakush a Military secrete.  And he issued official order not to talk and write about them.  He also prohibited physicians and scalars to study Hibakusha, and proclaimed that those who violated recorder should be similarly punished.  All the hibakusha were totally ignorance and followed their word.…..  Moreover the atomic bombs casualty commission later known as the radiation effect association strongly claimed that internal exposure to radiation is harmless to human body because the radiation level is so low.  So hibakusha suffering so called a burabura disease (consistent chronic sluggishness) were told that it is a fake which add more suffering to hibakusha.  I have also seen some burabura disease patients among nuclear power plant workers.  Electric companies have often announced that there is no damage to human body after nuclear accident.  But how come person from an electric company, who is not even doctor assured that there is no health damage immediately after the accident……… After the Fukushima accident, three nuclear power plant workers died.  And Topco denied any casualties from the radiation.  How they can prove that there is no relation to radiation?  In fact hundreds of mothers consulted me after the Fukushima accident whose children are suffering nose bleeding, fever and swelling thyroid and developing spots not only from Fukushima and north eastern Japan but also from Tokyo metropolitan area and as far as Yamanashi and Shizuoka prefecture.  …. I am seriously worried myself as I don’t know exactly what they can do.    No family can now be totally safe from radiation in Japan.  Only way for us all to survive is to abolish both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants in the world. 
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You can help Fukushima children by signing this urgent petition: http://fukushima-syomei-e.blogspot.jp/

Japan’s First Green party Formed by Anti-Nuclear Movement

by Adam Westlake  on July 31, 2012

http://japandailypress.com/japans-first-green-party-formed-by-anti-nuclear-movement-317768
With the ongoing protests in Tokyo against the government and its return to using nuclear power, Japan’s anti-nuclear movement has now grown large enough to establish the nation’s first green political party. Calling themselves Greens Japan, the party promises to voters that its two main focuses will be putting the environment first, and abolishing the country’s use of nuclear power plants. Greens Japan has been formed by a mixture of local-level politicians and activists, and they hope to be legally recognized as a political party by the next general elections.
Following last year’s nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant, all of Japan’s reactors began shutting down, with the final one going offline in early May.  After roughly two month of Japan going completely without nuclear power for the first time in over 40 years, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), along with support from the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), ordered the first restart of nuclear reactors in Oi, Fukui Prefecture. The newly formed Greens Japan party wants to be an alternative to these two main parties, which both stand in support of nuclear power. The party’s deputy leader, Akira Miyabe, says that this is the first chance for voters in Japan to support a political party that puts nuclear abolition and other environmental issues first.
Currently standing at around 1,000 members, Greens Japan is looking to emulate the green parties of Germany and many other European nations. The party will no doubt struggle to have any candidates ready if Prime Minister Noda calls for a snap election in the Lower House, which many analysts predict could happen at any time now. But should the general elections take place next summer as scheduled, Greens Japan says it will be prepared with at least 10 candidates.
http://japandailypress.com/japans-first-green-party-formed-by-anti-nuclear-movement-317768