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:4, Interesting)
Even if you don't care about your own life long term, what do you expect your life to be like living there? No younger people will go there, most of your neighbours will have gone, no services, no support. As an added bonus any chance of getting compensation will disappear because you proved your home is habitable. Of course everything in it is worthless now, at least until it is decontaminated and most of it just isn't worth the hassle. That is assuming it even works, a lot of stuff fails if not maintained or used for a couple of years.
Also cancer tends to be a painful and unpleasant death, so it's not something you just decide to take a chance on. Don't expect the doctor to visit you in the exclusion zone either.
Re:How about.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe, maybe not. [wikipedia.org]
Re:How about.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At least with Fukushima, these people were dislocated only because of an accident, and will eventually be able to reclaim their homes. With hydroelectric dams, those homes and towns are gone for as long as the dam is operational. But that doesn't fit the narrative that renewable energy is harmless while nuclear is evil, so nobody thinks of it that way.