Japan's Nuclear Refugees, Still Stuck In Limbo 78
mdsolar tips this story at the NY Times:
"Every month, Hiroko Watabe, 74, returns for a few hours to her abandoned house near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to engage in her own small act of defiance against fate. She dons a surgical mask, hangs two radiation-measuring devices around her neck and crouches down to pull weeds. She is desperate to keep her small yard clean to prove she has not given up on her home, which she and her family evacuated two years ago after a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami devastated the plant five miles away. Not all her neighbors are willing to take the risk; chest-high weeds now block the doorways of their once-tidy homes. 'In my heart, I know we can never live here again,' said Ms. Watabe, who drove here with her husband from Koriyama, the city an hour away where they have lived since the disaster. 'But doing this gives us a purpose. We are saying that this is still our home.' While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home."
Re:How about.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that simple. It isn't a constant exposure. You hang around long enough and you'll ingest stuff, which is a whole other ball game.
Re:How about.... (Score:4, Informative)
Green is 50
No. The green is clearly labeled "Less than 20". The yellow is 20-50 mSv / year, 50 being the annual limit for workers in the US.
There is a lot of red on the map.
Looks like about 15 sq. miles of red, unintended nature preserve, with >50 mSv/year. All the iodine-131 is long gone so that map is depicting cesium and strontium decay, which will persist for 300 years.
Re:How about.... (Score:4, Informative)
"Import food and use rainwater reserviours/wells."
Nice try, but they'll live in tents for the rest of their life.
That's THE risk of nuclear power, they have no insurance, so you'll get about 10.000 bucks for your lavish home if you're lucky.
BTW on other news, the Swiss are complaining to the EU that Germany ruins their nuke Spiel by exporting cheap Solar and Wind energy to Switzerland, a third cheaper (4 cents instead of 6), so even their pumping reservoirs aren't being used anymore for spikes at midday, Germans solar power is way cheaper.