By Hiroko Tabochi, The New York Times, October 14, 2011
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| Toshiyuki Hattori, who runs a sewage plant in Tokyo, surrounded by sacks of radioactive sludge. |
TOKYO — Takeo
Hayashida signed on with a citizens’ group to test for radiation near his son’s
baseball field in Tokyo after government officials told him they had no plans
to check for fallout from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Like Japan’s central government, local officials
said there was nothing to fear in the capital, 160 miles from the disaster
zone.
Then came the test
result: the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from
where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some
contaminated areas around Chernobyl.
The patch of ground was one of more than 20 spots in and around the
nation’s capital that the citizens’ group, and the respected nuclear research
center they worked with, found were contaminated with potentially harmful
levels of radioactive cesium.
It has been clear since the early days of the nuclear accident, the
world’s second worst after Chernobyl, that that the vagaries of wind and rain
had scattered worrisome amounts of radioactive materials in unexpected patterns
far outside the evacuation zone 12 miles around the stricken plant. But reports
that substantial amounts of cesium had accumulated as far away as Tokyo have
raised new concerns about how far the contamination had spread, possibly settling
in areas where the government has not even considered looking.
The government’s failure to act quickly, a growing chorus of
scientists say, may be exposing many more people than originally believed to
potentially harmful radiation. It is also part of a pattern: Japan’s leaders
have continually insisted that the fallout from Fukushima will not spread far,
or pose a health threat to residents, or contaminate the food chain. And
officials have repeatedly been proved wrong by independent experts and citizens’
groups that conduct testing on their own.
“Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air,
from the food. It’s everywhere,” said Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert at
Nagasaki University’s faculty of environmental studies and a medical doctor.
“But the government doesn’t even try to inform the public how much radiation
they’re exposed to.”
The reports of hot spots do not indicate how widespread contamination
is in the capital; more sampling would be needed to determine that. But they raise
the prospect that people living near concentrated amounts of cesium are being
exposed to levels of radiation above accepted international standards meant to
protect people from cancer and other illnesses.
Japanese nuclear experts and activists have begun agitating for more
comprehensive testing in Tokyo and elsewhere, and a cleanup if necessary.
Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United
States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’
measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the
Fukushima nuclear disaster.”
The government has not ignored citizens’ pleas entirely; it recently
completed aerial testing in eastern Japan, including Tokyo. But several experts
and activists say the tests are unlikely to be sensitive enough to be useful in
finding micro hot spots such as those found by the citizens’ group.
Kaoru Noguchi, head of Tokyo’s health and safety section, however,
argues that the testing already done is sufficient. Because Tokyo is so
developed, she says, radioactive material was much more likely to have fallen
on concrete, then washed away. She also said exposure was likely to be limited.
“Nobody stands in one spot all day,” she said. “And nobody eats dirt.”
Tokyo residents knew soon after the March 11 accident, when a tsunami
knocked out the crucial cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, that they were being
exposed to radioactive materials. Researchers detected a spike in radiation
levels on March 15. Then as rain drizzled down on the evening of March 21,
radioactive material again fell on the city.
In the following week, however, radioactivity in the air and water
dropped rapidly. Most in the city put aside their jitters, some openly scornful
of those — mostly foreigners — who had fled Tokyo in the early days of the
disaster.
But not everyone was convinced. Some Tokyo residents bought
dosimeters. The Tokyo citizens’ group, the Radiation
Defense Project, which grew out of a Facebook discussion page,
decided to be more proactive. In consultation with the Yokohama-based Isotope
Research Institute, members collected soil samples from near their own homes
and submitted them for testing.
Some of the results
were shocking: the sample that Mr. Hayashida collected under shrubs near his
neighborhood baseball field in the Edogawa ward measured nearly 138,000
becquerels per square meter of radioactive cesium 137, which can damage cells
and lead to an increased risk of cancer.
Edwin Lyman, a
physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington,
said most residents near Chernobyl were undoubtedly much worse off, surrounded
by widespread contamination rather than isolated hot spots. But he
said the 37,000 figure remained a good reference point for mandatory cleanup
because regular exposure to such contamination could result in a dosage of more
than one millisievert per year, the maximum recommended for the public by the
International Commission on Radiological Protection.
The most contaminated spot in the Radiation Defense survey, near a
church, was well above the level of the 1.5 million becquerels per square meter
that required mandatory resettlement at Chernobyl. The level is so much higher
than other results in the study that it raises the possibility of testing
error, but micro hot spots are not unheard of after nuclear disasters.
Japan’s relatively tame mainstream media, which is more likely to
report on government pronouncements than grass-roots movements, mainly ignored
the citizens’ group’s findings.
“Everybody just wants to believe that this is Fukushima’s problem,”
said Kota Kinoshita, one of the group’s leaders and a former television
journalist. “But if the government is not serious about finding out, how can we
trust them?”
Hideo Yamazaki, an expert in environmental analysis at Kinki
University in western Japan, did his own survey of the city and said he, too,
discovered high levels in the area where the baseball field is located.
“These results are highly localized, so there is no cause for panic,”
he said. “Still, there are steps the government could be taking, like
decontaminating the highest spots.”
Since then, there have been other suggestions that hot spots were more
widespread than originally imagined.
Last month, a local government in a Tokyo ward found a pile of
composted leaves at a school that measured 849 becquerels per kilogram of
cesium 137, over two times Japan’s legally permissible level for compost.
And on Wednesday, civilians who tested the roof of an apartment
building in the nearby city of Yokohama — farther from Fukushima than Tokyo —
found high quantities of radioactive strontium. (There was also one false alarm
this week when sky-high readings were reported in the Setagaya ward in Tokyo;
the government later said they were probably caused by bottles of radium, once
widely used to make paint.)
The government’s own aerial testing showed that although almost all of
Tokyo had relatively little contamination, two areas showed elevated readings.
One was in a mountainous area at the western edge of the Tokyo metropolitan
region, and the other was over three wards of the city — including the one
where the baseball field is situated.
The metropolitan government said it had started preparations to begin
monitoring food products from the nearby mountains, but acknowledged that food
had been shipped from that area for months.
Mr. Hayashida, who discovered the high level at the baseball field,
said that he was not waiting any longer for government assurances. He moved his
family to Okayama, about 370 miles to the southwest.
“Perhaps we could have stayed in Tokyo with no problems,” he said.
“But I choose a future with no radiation fears.
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