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Government publications play down radiation risks via Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center

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By Kataoka Ryohei

The Reconstruction Agency’s ‘Truth about Radiation’

The Reconstruction Agency compiled a 30-page, A5-sized booklet titled Hoshasen no Honto (Truth about Radiation), which it published and began distributing in March 2018. As of November 2018, 22,000 copies had been distributed to relevant government agencies and participants of functions such as PTA conventions (in Saga and Niigata) in and outside of Fukushima Prefecture. It is part of a “safety campaign” aimed at promoting recovery from the Fukushima nuclear accident. 

It presents a one-sided view, saying for example, “No proof of health impacts has been found (from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident),” “The occurrences of numerous cases of thyroid cancer from radiation are considered not worthy of consideration,” “The amount of radiation in the major cities of Fukushima is decreasing,” and “The people who have gone back to their hometowns are returning to their normal livelihoods.”

It contains three particularly big mistakes that were pointed out in citizen group negotiations with the government held in December 2018. One is the statement that the effects of radiation are “not inherited genetically.” The Ministry of the Environment’s “Integrated basic information on health effects caused by radiation” (published in 2015) states that “The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) estimates the risk of hereditary influence at 0.2% per Gray.” It is a mistake to conclude that the effects are not passed along genetically.

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The second mistake is found in the “Standards for radioactive materials in foods” table (shown below) regarding cesium 134 and 137. The figures on Japan’s standards for food in “normal” times are identical to the figures of the EU, US and Codex Alimentarius Commission for times of emergency. The booklet compares figures from circumstances so different as to be incomparable and states “standards are set at the world’s strictest level.” The truth is that the standards for drinking water at normal times are 8.7 Bq/kg in the EU, 4.2 Bq/kg in the US and not specified under the Codex Alimentarius. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW), the Consumer Affairs Agency and the Reconstruction Agency have all recognized this error, but it remains uncorrected at present.

The third mistake is the statement that “The increase in cancer risk due to 100-200 milliSieverts (mSv) exposure is about the same as from insufficient vegetable consumption or excessive salt intake.” The National Cancer Center of Japan, which provided the original data on cancer risk from lifestyle choices such as eating too few vegetables, announced in 2008 that it could not find any connection between vegetables and cancer. Making such a comparison in spite of that can only be called intentionally dishonest in that the booklet attempts to make exposure look less risky than it is.

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EU plans to ease restrictions on food from Fukushima area via Japan Today

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TOKYO

The European Union has told Japan that it plans to relax its restrictions on some food products from areas affected by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japanese officials said Thusday.

EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Junker conveyed the plan during talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ahead of a Group of 20 summit beginning Friday, according to the officials.

The EU was among 22 countries and regions that restricted farm and fisheries imports from Fukushima and 10 other nearby prefectures after meltdowns at the nuclear plant spewed radiation, contaminating plants, soil and fish.

Japan has established a radiation monitoring system since the Fukushima accident and set allowable limits that are much stricter than international standards. The government has conducted extensive efforts to decontaminate forests, farms and other areas by washing down radiation and removing topsoil.

The EU, which resumed imports of Fukushima rice in 2017, said it plans to allow soybeans from the prefecture as well as food and seafood from several neighboring prefectures.

Kyodo News agency said radiation inspection certificates will no longer be needed.

Junker told Abe that the decision came after an analysis of data provided by Japan. EU leaders said they plan to reach a consensus among member nations and a positive result is expected within several months, Kyodo said. It said Abe expressed hope for a complete lifting of the ban at an early date, saying a full recovery from the 2011 disaster is Japan’s deep wish.

Japan hopes to have all bans lifted before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

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South Korea express concern about food from Fukushima as Tokyo 2020 Chef de Mission Seminar begins via Insidethegames.biz

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The Korean Sport and Olympic Committee (KSOC) has written to Tokyo 2020 organisers to express concern about food from Fukushima being served at the Games.

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Baseball and softball matches will be staged there and Fukushima prefecture will also host the start of the Japanese leg of the Torch Relay.

Produce from Fukushima has been served at official events, including IOC Coordination Commissions, but the KSOC said they are worried about contamination.

Their letter comes at a period of increasing tension between Japan and South Korea.

“Within our planning framework we will respond to them accordingly,” said Toru Kobayash, Tokyo 2020’s director of NOC services, to Reuters.

“We have said that we will respond to them properly. 

“We have had no further questions [from South Korea].”

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South Korea concerned over food safety at Olympics with events slated for Fukushima via The Guardian

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South Korea is considering making its own arrangements to feed its athletes at next year’s Tokyo Olympics, citing concerns over the safety of food from Fukushima, media reports said.

In addition, South Korean sports authorities have requested that international groups be permitted to monitor radiation levels during the 2020 Games.

Food safety concerns in South Korea have grown since Fukushima city was chosen to host six softball games and one baseball game next summer. Fukushima prefecture will also be the location for the start of the domestic leg of the Olympic torch relay, beginning next March.

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“Nothing is more important than safety. We will seek consultations with the International Olympic Committee and others to secure our athletes’ safety and ensure that the Tokyo Olympics will be held in a safe environment,” the South Korean sports minister, Park Yang-woo, said this week, according to Yonhap news agency.

Seoul’s concerns come amid an escalating dispute with Tokyo over South Korean court rulings ordering Japanese companies to compensate Koreanswho were forced to work in Japanese factories and mines before and during the second world war, when the Korean peninsula was a Japanese colony.

The dispute has affected trade and cultural exchanges, while figures released this week show that the number of South Korean tourists visiting Japan fell by 7.6% year on year last month – its lowest level for almost a year – according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation.

Bloomberg reported that the Korea Sport and Olympic Committee is to request international organisations such as Greenpeace be allowed to monitor radiation levels at Olympic venues.

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Japanese government to send staff to disaster-hit Fukushima towns to help restart farming production via Japan Times

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The agriculture ministry said Tuesday it will send officials to 12 municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture that were hit by the 2011 nuclear disaster to help farmers there resume agricultural production.

From April 2020, one official will be stationed in each of the 12 municipalities near Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant, including the facility’s two host towns.

The ministry officials will create teams with prefectural government and local agricultural cooperatives officials.

The teams will hold discussions with local farmland owners and farmers hoping to expand their operations in order to devise and implement farming resumption plans.

The ministry hopes to consolidate abandoned parcels of farmland in cooperation with local agriculture-related organizations and start large-scale farming there using advanced equipment.

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The harvests of Chernobyl via Aeon

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By Kate Brown

You can’t miss the berry-pickers in the remote forests of northern Ukraine, a region known as Polesia. They ride along on bicycles or pile out of cargo vans. They are young, mostly women and children, lean and suntanned, with hands stained a deep purple. And they are changing the landscape around them. Rural communities across eastern Europe are struggling economically, but the Polesian towns are booming with new construction. Two hundred miles west of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, thousands of mushroom- and berry-pickers are revving up the local economy. As they forage, they are even changing the European diet, in ways both culinary and radiological.

The rise of the Polesian pickers adds a strange twist to the story that began on 26 April 1986, when an explosion at the Chernobyl plant blew out at least 50 million curies of radioactive isotopes. Soviet leaders traced out a 30 kilometre radius around the stricken reactor and emptied it of its residents. Roughly 28,000 square kilometres outside this exclusion zone were also contaminated. In total, 130,000 people were resettled, but hundreds of thousands remained on irradiated territory, including the Polesian towns of Ukraine’s Rivne Province. In 1990, Soviet officials resolved to resettle several hundred thousand more residents but ran out of money to carry out new mass evacuations.

Last summer, we went to Rivnе to talk to people who in the late 1980s wrote petitions begging for resettlement. In the letters, which we had found in state archives in Kiev and Moscow, writers expressed worries about their health and that of their children, while describing a sense of abandonment. Help never arrived; the Chernobyl accident came just as the Soviet state began to topple economically and politically. In 1991, the whole giant crashed to earth, crushing factories, farms, hospitals, schools, and casting aside a whole way of life called ‘Soviet’ that millions of people, even as they grumbled about it, had held dear. For decades after, local economies in Polesia slowed to a birch-sap trickle. Revitalisation programmes launched by international development agencies and government projects in the mid 1990s failed or were scaled too small to have an impact. Former collective farms, unable to survive without government subsidies, turned to weeds. Young people took off for cities.

We arrived in the Rivne Province expecting to see tumbled-down peasant cottages and overgrown gardens, villages inhabited mostly by the elderly, as in many regions directly in the lee of the plant. Instead, we zoomed along on remarkably good roads, checked into a comfortable new roadside hotel, swam in a just-opened sports-club pool, and drove through freshly built suburban developments with large single-family houses, surrounded by grilles, sprinklers and lawn dwarfs. The whir and pound of saws and hammers building more houses echoed across the former farmland.

Startled by all this economic development, we asked where the money came from. Locals talked of the amber barons. In the past few years, the price of amber rose 1,500 per cent, driven by Chinese demand. Gangs of armed men took control of the lucrative local business of unlicenced logging and digging for amber. The loggers and amber prospectors bring in money; they also leave behind deep trenches and scorched clearings pitted with furrows, stumps and sand, lending swathes of the Polesian forest the look of a Saudi beach party on the morning after. But much of the newfound wealth comes from the pickers whom we started noticing all around.  

Anyone in Polesia can pick anywhere, as long as they are willing to brave the radioactive isotopes. After Chernobyl, Soviet officials strongly discouraged picking berries in contaminated forest areas, which promised to remain radioactive for decades. As the years passed, fewer and fewer people heeded the warnings. In the past five years, picking has grown into a booming business as new global market connections have enabled the mass sale of berries abroad. A person willing to do the hard work of stooping 10 hours a day and heaving 40-pound boxes of fruit to the road can earn good money. The women and child pickers are revitalising the Polesian economy on a modest, human-powered scale. They are quietly and unceremoniously doing what development agencies and government programmes failed to do: restoring commercial activity to the contaminated territory around the Chernobyl Zone.

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Contrary to our assumption, the berries rejected as too radioactive were not discarded, but were merely placed aside. Then they, too, were weighed and sold, just at lower prices. The wholesalers we spoke to said that the radioactive berries were used for natural dyes. The pickers claimed the hot berries were mixed with cooler berries until the assortment came in under the permissible level. The berries could then legally be sold to Poland to enter the European Union (EU) market, even if some individual berries measured five times higher than the permissible level. Such mixing is legal as long as the overall mix of berries falls within the generous limit of 600 becquerel per kilogram set by the EU after the Chernobyl disaster.

No one, certainly no official, ever envisioned revitalising the economy by exploiting berries and mushrooms. Months after the 1986 accident, Soviet scientists determined that forest products were the most radioactive of all edible crops, and banned their consumption. However, villagers in Polesia never stopped harvesting berries and mushrooms (as well as game and fish) from the forests outside the fenced-off Chernobyl Zone. Women sold their produce surreptitiously at regional markets, deftly avoiding the police who learned to identify Polesians by their homemade baskets.

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This is the usual, colonial exchange of raw materials for higher-priced, manufactured goods. In this case, though, the trade signals a positive development for the locals. For three decades, Polesians ate radioactive forest foods themselves. Berries that fall below EU radiation standardscan pass into European markets, destined for wealthier consumers abroad. This flow of goods westward marks a small shift in the global caste system, in which poorer populations usually consume the most toxic by-products of the industrial world. Adding a further twist, Polesian berries are often marketed to the western European customers as organic; radioactivity does not affect that designation.

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Despite the fact that the nuclear disaster presented scientists with a unique living laboratory, few funding agencies have been willing to finance Chernobyl studies on non-cancerous health effects; based on Japanese bomb-survivor research, industry scientists have insisted that there would be no measurable non-malignant impacts. In Chernobyl-contaminated Polesia, however, few people doubt that ingesting radioactive toxins over decades has a biological cost. Galina, the woman who declared that there was ‘no Chernobyl’, changed her view later when talking about her own health. Trim and fit at the age of 50, she had a stroke followed by two surgeries for ‘women’s cancer’. About her cancers, she said: ‘All of a sudden, they started growing day by day. I asked the doctors if they’d hold up the operation until autumn [after the harvest], but they said I’d be dead by then. Probably, these problems were caused by radiation. It does have an effect, apparently.’ Even less is known about non-cancer health impacts from Chernobyl. Many locals complain of aching and swollen joints, headaches, chronic fatigue and legs that mysteriously stop moving. There have been almost no studies investigating these vague complaints.

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[…]The mass marketing of radioactive Polesian forest products is an unexpected outcome of policies aimed at finalising the disaster. It is a development that disputes the focus on Chernobyl as a ‘place’. Rather, Chernobyl is an event, an ongoing occurrence that transpires as long as the radioactive energy released in the accident continues to decay.

Chernobyl could be the emblematic disaster of the Anthropocene, the modern geological epoch in which humans are the driving force of planetary change. The widespread appearance of man-made materials, such as radioactive isotopes from nuclear tests and reactor accidents, are archetypal signals of this new age. Our bodies, like the Polesian berries, are receptacles of those materials. More than 60 new nuclear power plants are currently under construction, poised to add more radioactivity to a human-generated environmental cocktail that also includes plastics, heavy metals and industrial chemicals. Far beyond Chernobyl, a return to normal no longer means a return to natural; the whole world is Polesia. 

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Evacuated Fukushima town begins efforts to have produce restrictions lifted via The Mainichi

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FUTABA, Fukushima — Vegetable cultivation trials began in September in this town, which has been completely evacuated since Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station melted down following the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011.

The prefectural government has been putting on the trials with cooperation from the town office as well as farmers who were based in the town in northeastern Japan.

At a full staff meeting of the town assembly on Sept. 5, it was explained that if the crops can be confirmed to be safe, then the aim will be to have shipping restrictions removed on a part of the town whose evacuation orders are expected to be lifted next spring. It is thought that doing so will help revive farming in the area.

According to the town office, seeds and saplings for five produce items, including broccoli, cabbage and spinach, were planted at three locations in the Morotake district on Sept. 2. The district is currently classed as an area preparing for the lifting of an evacuation order, from which orders may soon be lifted.

It is the first planting in the town to produce food since the onset of the nuclear disaster in March 2011. Harvesting is expected to take place from late October to mid-November, but because the aim is to confirm data, all of the crop will be disposed of and not distributed.

If the inspection can confirm that the radiation dosage is lower than the national standard of 100 becquerels per 1 kilogram, then the prefectural government will make a request to the national government to have the shipment restrictions on the area removed.

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Should Fukushima food be served at the Olympics? via the Japan Times

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BY KARYN NISHIMURA

FUKUSHIMA – For years, the government has sought to convince consumers that food from Fukushima is safe despite the nuclear disaster. But will it serve the prefecture’s produce at the Tokyo Olympics?

It’s a thorny subject for the authorities. They pitched the Olympics in part as a chance to showcase the recovery of areas affected by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

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Japan allows a maximum of 100 becquerels of cesium radioactivity per kilogram. The European Union, by comparison, sets that level at 1,250 Bq/kg and the U.S. at 1,200.

According to officials, from April 2018 to March, 9.21 million bags of rice were examined with not a single one exceeding the Japanese limit.

The same for 2,455 samples of fruit and vegetables, 4,336 pieces of meat and 6,187 ocean fish.

“Only river fish and wild mushrooms have on just six occasions been found to exceed the limits,” said Kenji Kusano, director of the Fukushima Agricultural Technology Center in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, the government’s main screening site.

‘Completely safe’

The International Olympic Committee has said it is still weighing how to handle the matter.

“Food menus and catering companies for the Olympic Village are under discussion and have yet to be defined,” a spokesman said.

Tokyo Olympics organizers say promoting areas affected by the 2011 disaster remains a key goal.

“Supporting the area’s reconstruction efforts through the sourcing of its food and beverage products is one of our basic strategies; we are therefore seriously considering doing this,” organizing committee spokesman Masa Takaya said.

He said rules on what food and drink could be brought in independently by teams are still being reviewed.

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Fukushima to relax blanket radiation testing for beef cattle via The Asahi Shimbun

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FUKUSHIMA–In the absence of significant radiation levels being detected in cattle for more than six years, Fukushima Prefecture decided to switch from blanket to random safety testing.

Similar moves have been seen in Iwate, Miyagi and Tochigi prefectures.

Blanket inspections in those prefectures had been the norm since the nuclear crisis triggered by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster unfolded.

Thirty-three other prefectures which voluntarily inspect cattle for health and safety reasons have also made such a move.

Fukushima prefectural authorities announced the change in policy at a Dec. 23 review meeting attended by beef producers, distributors and others.

Under the plan, at least one animal will be checked per year for each farm, with the exception of “difficult-to-return” zones where radiation levels remain high.

Blanket testing will continue for old cows to be slaughtered for beef.

The decision will receive formal approval in January.

In the summer after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in March 2011, cattle exceeding the provisional standard of 500 becquerels per kilogram were found in Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi and Tochigi prefectures.

While the central government has allowed beef to be delivered if farms check one animal a year and meet other conditions, all four prefectures have continued conducting strict inspections of their own accord.

Since August 2011 when blanket testing started, no animals in Fukushima Prefecture have been found to exceed the standard set in 2012 of 100 becquerels per kilogram. The prefectural government concluded that safety can be secured without inspecting all cattle.

Still, according to a survey compiled by the prefecture this past October covering 2,584 consumers, 45.9 percent of respondents insisted that blanket testing be continued.

A staff member of a major distributor, said: “It seems that many consumers only trust products that have passed inspections.”

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Philippines lifts restrictions on importing food from Fukushima via The Japan Times

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MANILA – Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said Thursday his country had lifted restrictions on Japanese food imports imposed following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, due to a lower risk of radioactive contamination.

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The Southeast Asian country had required radiation testing of beef and vegetables from Fukushima and Ibaraki, as well as fishery products from the two prefectures along with Tochigi and Gunma following the March 2011 triple meltdowns at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant that were triggered by a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

A total of 54 countries and regions implemented measures following the crisis. The announcement by the Philippines brings the number with them still in place to 20, with the United States, China and South Korea among countries that maintain some restrictions, according to the farm ministry.

Motegi and Locsin also agreed to step up security cooperation, with an eye to countering China’s militarization of artificial islands in disputed parts of the South China Sea, as well as economic cooperation, including infrastructure development.

Following the meeting, the two signed an agreement for Japan to provide a low-interest loan of up to ¥4.4 billion ($40 million) to reinforce major bridges in Manila.
Later in the day, Motegi paid a courtesy call on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and toured one of the 10 patrol ships supplied by Japan to the Philippine Coast Guard to protect its waters.

Read more at Philippines lifts restrictions on importing food from Fukushima

Related article: フィリピン、輸入規制全廃 福島産牛肉など―原発事故影響薄れ via Jiji.com





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