Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) started the operation of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture and began to transmit the electricity to the metropolitan area in March, 1971. Since that time, for 40 years, we have been forced to live with anxiety and fear over the risk of extraordinary accidents, negative effects of the radiation leak on the environment and living organisms and the eventual nuclear garbage.
Up to now, numerous people of Fukushima prefecture and the country at large have sounded the alarm, pressed for more thoroughgoing countermeasures against potential accidents, disclosure of information and holding of explanatory meetings for local residents, and raised the voice against the plutonium thermal project and the overworking of the superannuated nuclear plant.
The disastrous accident of the Fukushima nuclear plant which we had feared for years became the actual reality on March 11.
Two weeks have passed since the outbreak of the earthquake and nuclear disaster, and we are searching for our ways for survival amid the confusion and fright, with the sorrow and resentment at our loss of hometowns and lives. Under the current crisis situation, we demand that the central government, prefectures and municipalities, and TEPCO should cope with the urgent requirements and tasks as follows:
1) Carry out the evacuation of children and pregnant women as swiftly as possible.
Unborn babies and growing children are those who would get the most serious effects of radiation. The government should ensure the speedy evacuation of children and pregnant women from the high-risk area of radiation exposure, particularly from those locations such as 30-kilometers range where inhabitants are ordered to take indoor refugee and those places where atmosphere radioactivity has been recorded or which may become the leeward of the nuclear plant.
2) The evacuation area should be expanded, in order to avoid further exposure to radioactivity.
The evacuation area is limited to the 20-kilometers range at the moment. But the radioactive contamination has expanded further, and a high dose of radioactivity, which is 400 times as strong as the usual revel, has been observed at Fukushima City, 50-kilometers away from the nuclear plant. However, due to the fact that there is no evacuation direction from the government, numerous inhabitants haven’t evacuated, attending their schools or workplaces, and they are confronted with the danger of radiation exposure.
We demand that the central government, prefectures and the municipalities should expand the evacuation area drastically, taking into consideration the current situation of radioactive contamination, the weather conditions and the serious risk of possible radiation exposure.
3) Correct and exact information should be disclosed in order to cope with the danger of radiation exposure, and necessary relief goods should be supplied properly to those residents who haven’t been able to evacuate to safety zones.
There are lots of residents who haven’t evacuated, due to the lack of appropriate information by which they might be able to decide on their possible evacuation, the old age or bad health, some family reason that family member(s) might be impossible to move, difficulty to leave the workplaces at the non-evacuation-designated area, strong resistance to abandoning of hometowns and deep-rooted lives, and so on.
What we need now is not “false safety”, based on the inaccurate information that is manipulated “in order to avoid a panic”. Accurate and in-depth information is necessary. Disclose the accurate information on the risk of internal radiation exposure, based on a clear distinction between the external exposure and the internal one. Current information on the radioactive contamination of water, atmosphere and foods are usually mixing up the acute injuries with the delayed onset ones, and the internal exposure with the external one. With this kind of information, we cannot judge the circumstances correctly nor decide on our appropriate course of action. We need the real-time information on the Fukushima nuclear plant, prior notification of large-scale release of radioactive substance such as dry vents, realistic forecast on the explosion risk, diffusion simulation of the radioactive substance based on the detailed weather information, et cetera.
Those residents who cannot evacuate to distant places are left in isolation without proper information and necessary relief goods. The central government, the prefecture and TEPCO should accept their responsibility to provide those residents with their necessary daily goods, accurate information and the protective items.
4) The ten power-generation nuclear reactors of Fukushima should be decommissioned.
The central government and TEPCO should exert all their powers to calm down the disastrous situation at the nuclear plant, giving the highest priority to the health and safety of the population, including the future generation, and the national land conservation.
We cannot coexist with the nuclear plants which may bring about such a tragic disaster. We demand that the central government and TEPCO should decommission the whole ten reactors of the Fukushima nuclear power plants, through the method which would contain further diffusion of the radiation contamination, and to preserve the safety of the decommissioned sites for many years.
5) We request a nationwide stoppage of all the nuclear power plants and nuclear-related facilities and a radical review of the national nuclear policy.
No ones knows when and where the next massive earthquake may break out. However, the day will come for certain. The people in other regions should never repeat the experience of fear that we have been going through and the bitter feeling of regret that “We haven’t been in time!” The central government, the electric power companies and the prefectures should halt all the operating nuclear plants as soon as possible and take the utmost preventive measures against nuclear-earthquake disasters, based on the latest knowledge and the precautionary principle.
The central government, TEPCO and other nuclear-power operators, which have been promoting the nuclear power generation and the nuclear-fuel -cycle policy, should have their serious reflection and apologize to the people in regard to the current nuclear disaster, and fulfill their enormous responsibilities even slightly with conversion to the denuclearization policy.
We wish to express our sincere gratitude to the sympathetic supports from people in Japan and the world at large at the current earthquake-tsunami and nuclear disasters. Moreover, we wish to express our deepest appreciation to those people who are making utmost efforts at the risk of their lives to bring the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster under control.
We call on all the people to take action in order not to bring the enormous sacrifices caused by the earthquake-hit nuclear disaster to naught.
Pay your close attention to our harsh reality in Fukushima prefecture. Radioactivity doesn’t know prefectural boundaries nor national borders. We give the highest priority to our health and lives as well as those of the future generation. Please raise your voice, pressing the central government, prefectures and municipalities to disclose correct and exact information and to take appropriate measures.
Hope in the future rises only from our facing up to the reality caused by the nuclear fuel and the actual society which has brought about the current nuclear tragedy.
We call on people in the earthquake/tsunami-stricken Northeastern region and people who share the risk of radiation exposure in the country at large and all over the world: let’s rally our human courage and wisdom for holding the damages and sufferings to the minimum and for not committing similar grave mistakes again.
March 25, 2011
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