 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program, Nuclear Free Future Conversation, coming to you remotely during this COVID time from the studios of Channel 17 Center for Media and Democracy, Town Meeting TV here in Burlington, Vermont. And the subject of our discussion today is Fukushima Daiichi Japan Nuclear Meltdowns at 10 and to discuss this, I have my guests who thankfully have returned to our discussion, the Fairwinds Energy Education Founders, Maggie Gunderson and Arne Gunderson and board member Chihokanako, who is returning also to our show from Fairwinds Energy Education. So thank you very much, all of you for coming back on the show after being away for a couple of years. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. So we, first of all, we have, we post your website, www.fairwinds, F-A-I-R-E-W-I-N-D-S dot org so that we know all the enormous amount of work you've been doing for the past several years since you relocated to South Carolina, I believe for family reasons, right? So, and now we are commemorating in our way and Chihokanako, you're here also Chihokanako the 10th year after the Fukushima Daiichi Meltdowns. So your work is ongoing and amazing. To us, your dogged tenacity to this issue, which people want to forget. Vermont Yankee has closed and we're dealing with the nuclear waste. However, you are dealing with the disaster in Fukushima. So, and continuously along with all of the other subjects. So to open up, could you refer to the article that was titled Japan hasn't recovered 10 years after Fukushima meltdowns? Yeah, we wrote that because of the 10th commemoration. Everybody wants to forget Fukushima except the people that live there. The Japanese government wants to put it behind and focus on the Olympics. And they called up recovery Olympics and they're anything but recovered. And the article that you referred to discusses the fact that Japan has improved. Half of the radiation decayed away just naturally and there has been cleanups in populated areas, but it hasn't recovered. What we're finding is radiation is blowing in from the mountains right back into the areas that have been previously cleaned. You know, if you think about the green mountains from say St. Albans down to Manchester. Well, that's about the size of the mountain ranges that run through Fukushima and Fukushima prefecture. And can you imagine trying to clean that from St. Albans down to Manchester clean every nook and cranny of the green mountains? You can't. And that's the problem in Japan that it will continually recontaminate for centuries. Yes, and Arnie, I've seen the pictures of the garbage bags, ordinary plastic garbage bags. And then what do they do with them? Well, they're far from ordinary. They weigh a ton each and they throw the dirt into them and the contaminated soil in the areas that they've cleaned. They have over 10 million bags, 10 million tons of radioactive waste that needs to be disposed of. What they're doing with it unfortunately is a lot of it is getting incinerated. And then the radioactivity is being put in concrete for public works projects all over Japan. So they're making radioactive highways, radioactive buildings. When I was in Tokyo a couple of years ago, I was in a parking lot and I think they're called bumpers, car bumpers, the concrete things you drive your wheels up against when you're in a parking lot. And I set my Geiger counter down on top of it. It was highly radioactive. So they're taking this radioactive waste, reducing the size of it, but not the radioactivity. Some of it blows out the stack and recontaminates Fukushima or comes across the Pacific and into the Pacific Northwest. And the rest they take and add to concrete and spread out all over Japan. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And who is the watchdog there in Japan? Because another point that you make in the article is that Northern Japan remains radiologically contaminated. It's actually contaminated. And who is the watchdog there? They're equivalent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is something called the METI. And they created another agency, the NRA National, something, and I can't remember what it stood for, but they have two oversight agencies, but they've been captured by the nuclear industry right after Fukushima. I got to talk to Neodokan, who was the Prime Minister of Japan. And during the meltdowns. And so remember the name METI, and of course, TEPCO was the owner. And I was talking about his decision when to evacuate and he was facing evacuating 30 million people in Tokyo. And we were talking about the information he was getting. And he said, Arnie, the information I received from TEPCO and METI, his own government, was neither accurate nor timely. So his own government was telling the top guy in government the wrong information and they weren't giving up to him in a timely fashion. Now that's around the world, we see that though, the regulators have been captured by the industry that is supposed to be protecting us. So they are serving the industry instead of the people, the victims. And what about your third point in the article, previously cleaned areas are becoming radiologically contaminated again? You did describe something of that right now. Yeah, we found, I was in a town called Minami Soma which was evacuated after the meltdowns and remained empty for a couple of years. It's a large town and TEPCO cleaned it up. And I was on the roof of the town halls, four story building and it had been epoxy. They had cleaned the roof, put a beautiful epoxy finish on it, put solar collectors on it. And I climbed underneath the solar collector and found this little pile of dust and took a sample and it was highly radioactive. The only way that could happen is if it was blowing back in from the mountain ranges. And the kids are riding their bicycles through this stuff. We're finding it in shoelaces. So it's not a problem that's solvable although Japan would like to have their people believe that these particles, these micro particles that we're finding that are highly radioactive are inconsequential. In fact, they get in your lungs, they get in your liver, they get in your GI tract. And in the long term, they're quite cancerous. And meanwhile, we're coming up to the Olympics and your fourth point in the article is the Olympic venues in Fukushima Prefecture are more contaminated than in Tokyo Olympic venues. Yeah, there's a place called the Jay Village which is the national soccer camp for all of Japan. And we found radio activity there, so has Greenpeace. We found radioactive plutonium in the soil there which of course is one of the most lethal elements known to man. So what's happening is most of the Olympics will be done in Tokyo. And at the Tokyo Olympic venues, they're relatively clean. At other places in Tokyo, they're not. So the best place to sleep is on the track. So Tokyo Olympic venues are relatively clean but they also wanna showcase that Fukushima has been cleaned and it hasn't been. So just by the samples we took at the Jay Camp is just that one last indication that this problem is not gonna go away and Japan has not recovered. Maggie, you are in the forefront of being on guard against the misinformation that we're receiving. Like here in Vermont, we can breathe a sigh of relief. We say Vermont Yankee is gone but we're dealing with a propagation of nuclear power plants around the world even as some are closing through the efforts of people like you. And but what about the, what do you see today happening? I see a couple of things too. Let's talk about Vermont because that's where we're from and you and Chihou both live. We still have concerns about Vermont Yankee. Arnie testified, Farrowan submitted testimony to the public service board to show that there's micro-marked particles of radiation that can migrate and we talked about this and that's what all of our scientific work over the last few years has been about and we published another paper in November. So peer-reviewed journal article that shows this occurs and this is based that particular article that Arnie, Dr. Marco Kalthofen of WPI and I all did together shows that radioactive micro-particles blow in the wind and they recontaminate just like Arnie's talking to you and those measurements were done at Olympic sites for this peer-reviewed paper. And in that, when we look at decommissioning for Vermont Yankee, for example, we tried to get that put in that there had to be certain monitoring standards but it was not put in. And so they're allowed to do a technique called rubberization. They take some of the concrete and they can grind it up like when you see a highway ground up and then new tarmac put down where there can take this old concrete at the site but there's no methodology for oversight. There's no methodology for exactly how to measure if that concrete is contaminated. And when they rubberize it, it's not in an enclosed protected unit whether that's tenting or a building itself, they're not doing that. So that literally that radioactivity, if any of it is ground in and we believe that it will be and we can prove that is going to be blowing in the wind and it's gonna end up in the water that you drink in Vermont, the food you eat and people are gonna breathe it in, anyone who lives near there and there's a school right next to the site. So this is a major concern for Vermonters as it is for the work that Chihou and Arnie and I do and the work that we do, the community volunteer citizen science that gives us the science to do what we're doing. Chihou has worked with us on that. We couldn't do the work we're doing if it wasn't all of us doing this together and being a community and working together. Chihou did some of the key translations with former prime minister, Naoda Khan and she was there in person doing live translation. Yeah, Chihou, could you come in on this? And I understand that there was a wonderful video that I just watched called, well, it was with Mary Olson, Humanity Rising. And it was such a wonderful, wonderful presentation of the Fukushima disaster. And Chihou, could you come in and tell us something of your experience? Because I understand that you went to Japan only 10 days after March 11th, 2011. So I primarily went home to my home which is Iwate Prefecture which is 150 miles north of Fukushima Daiichi reactors and it was not an easy journey at the time because obviously infrastructure was completely in shambles, train was not running, et cetera, but I made it within Japan, I made it. Anyway, it's hard to capture what the last 10 years being since that time because it's been a series of disbelief and disappointment or maybe outrage you might say that you thought that the, because what I was witnessing all those years is that yes, there's definitely we are affected by the fallout radiation even as far, even farther as my home town of Morioka which is 150 miles from the reactors. And yet people don't talk about it or more importantly, the government and the nuclear industry they poured so much efforts, campaign, PR and money into helping people, coursing people to accept that, yes, it's going to be all right. Yes, this is all right, we can go back to the contaminated area for those people who evacuated from Fukushima towns and villages, it's okay, it's going to be okay. Why is it like that? Because the international nuclear industry set up offices along the coast of Fukushima now. Aya Ie has a huge office in a town called I think Tamura Machi and they are studying the effects of radiation studying, but also it's a huge framing, propaganda. I think some regional people say device to, in a way, force people to accept the reality of nuclear contaminated world. It's not just about Japan. I think it's a global concern. I'm sorry, I went off tangent, but this is- Oh, no, no, no, but what is the IA? You just use the- Oh yeah, International Atomic Energy Agency. Yeah, so it's basically nuclear, pro-nuclear regulatory agency of the world. And it's, I don't know if it's a United Nations agency but you can talk about that. It is a United Nations chartered agency, but in its charter, it's to monitor and regulate and promote nuclear energy. So to say that they're not working to an end to make us all think that everything's okay is just a lie. But also, sorry to interrupt, but UN, I can never pronounce it. UN, what's the scientific committee on the effects of atomic radiation, right? That's also, that's the United Nations agency. They just came up with the 2020 report last year, I guess. And they basically preempted all the possible health effects that might come from Fukushima fallouts by saying that, quote, in the year since 2013 report, no adverse health effects among Fukushima prefecture residents have been documented. They concluded it already. And so there is no recourse for the, not just the residents of Fukushima but elsewhere in Japan, you know, if they're sick. Well, international authority says there is no negative effects. So what if you get sick, you cannot blame anybody. So it is outrageous. I think a lot of people feel outraged in Japan. And yet, this is also the hard part for me to swallow because people basically it's a Japanese society, the nature of the society perhaps, but people who voice dissenting opinions are marginalized. It's easier for Japanese society to do that way. So there's kind of insidious shutting down of dissenting voices happening on one hand that goes hand in hand with all this huge campaign. And I'm just really heart, this heartened to see witness all this. I stop now. Well, no, the thing is, Chihou, you don't stop and that is why we admire you and we're so fortunate to have you on this program now. And our viewers know that Fairwind's energy education has been on this nuclear free show for over 10 years. And we appreciate so much your input and you're waking us up about the issue and the ongoing issue. And Maggie, would you come back and comment on the community volunteer project and citizen science that is ongoing? Is it all over the world or is it just in the United States? No, it started in Japan. And we work in conjunction with Dr. Marco Caltofen at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which is called WPI now. And it started in Japan. We've done work since Fukushima there. Then we also started about a year after that in UK. And we worked in UK around Sellafield nuclear facility and waste area that has leaked into the Irish Sea. And then we have numerous sites through Fairwind's energy education and separately, Dr. Marco Caltofen has sites that he's continued testing at like the Hanford Waste Storage in Washington State, which he works with Hanford Challenge to protect and defend the local population there from all the federal waste repository that's leaking everywhere and impacting the environment. So what Chihou's talking about happening in Fukushima happens here in the United States too. It's happening in the UK. It's happening in other countries who I know from Dr. Helen Caldecott and some of her work and her colleagues that it's happened also in France. And it's all these areas and people attest to and I could name many other locations. It's a worldwide problem where governments wanna keep weapons, they wanna show might is right and nuclear power feeds into the weapon cycle. And Arnie can explain the science on that, but the two go hand in hand and we didn't know that when Arnie and I got involved in the nuclear industry, each of us separately, we met in the industry. We thought, we were both trained with the Atoms for Peace program and taught the Atoms for Peace program. So we thought we were doing something that was anti-war and anti-bomb. We were both horrified about what had happened with the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan and done as a target to show the world. It wasn't needed. Those papers were released I think 20 years ago that proved that out of from World War II papers. And I just feel very strongly that we continue this work and we show that the nuclear industry and the weapons industry go together. Right. And Arnie, the fact is that today, the nuclear power industry is reviving itself as we see on your smoke screen video that we'll show at some point during this program. But how is it that they can get away with saying that nuclear power is a green industry and that it's needed now? And that's a great question. Now, when I'm out talking, people will say, what are you gonna do without it? I'll present alternatives like wind, solar batteries and people will say, yes, but we need a big boy toy, the nuclear power reactors. They'll also claim that we need nuclear for CO2. Now, I built these plants 50 years ago when nobody was talking about CO2. They weren't built for CO2 reduction ever. So they're hiding behind what we call a CO2 smoke screen and the video addresses that. What the video shows is that the IAEA and another group called WANO, World Association of Nuclear Operators, says that to mitigate global warming, we need a thousand nuclear plants in the next 30 years. So that's about one nuke every 10 days has to come online. If you do the math, and we do in the smoke screen video, it shows that it would cost $8 trillion and it would only reduce carbon dioxide by 6%. So building new nukes doesn't solve the problem. One, it takes 30 years to even make a little dent in the problem compared to if you can put a windmill up in a year. And secondly, it's extraordinarily expensive. So money that would be better spent on wind and solar and batteries is getting funneled into a more expensive. Why it's because of lobbyists on Congress. The well financed lobbyists have the year of a lot of congressmen. Thank God they don't have burnies here, but a lot of the congressmen believe what the lobbyists in the nuclear industry are doing. And you can show that film to your viewers now, Margaret. Okay, we'll do that. In 2015, human activity released 35,810 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. In order to avoid catastrophic climate change, this number must quickly be reduced. Currently, our CO2 production grows by 2% every year as people worldwide seek a more affluent lifestyle. The World Nuclear Association, or WNA, has a plan to solve this problem, building 1,000 new nuclear reactors before the year 2050. That means we would need to build a nuclear reactor every 12 days for the next 33 years. Our existing reactors offset only 3% of global emissions. Every time a new reactor goes online, our carbon footprint goes down slightly and only by this much. Along the way, outdated reactors must be decommissioned, the deadly waste must be tended in perpetuity, and each new reactor built will increase the probability of atomic disaster somewhere in the world. Constructing this infrastructure will cost $8.2 trillion. Even after spending all this money and waiting all this time by the year 2050, these new nuclear reactors will have offset only 3.9 gigatons of CO2, which is less than 10% of the reduction that we need. The nuclear industry touts CO2 reduction to greenwash its agenda. For the nuclear industry, $8.2 trillion is good business. For humanity, it is an opportunity cost. Precious time and money wasted on the wrong thing. If we follow the WNA, another generation will pass and climate change will only get worse. We already have clean, cheap, and timely ways to reduce CO2 emissions, and nuclear power is not one of them. The nuclear solution to climate change is a smoke screen. We don't deny science. Help us protect the water you drink, the food you eat, and the air you breathe. Radiation knows no borders. Now, when we've seen the video and what is that main organization, the nuclear organization that is named there? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with it. I was WANO, W-A-N-O. It's the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Here in the United States, we have an EI Nuclear Energy Institute, and they've got a $70 million a year budget to lobby Congress. And of course, your local utilities around the country have similar budgets. And above that NEI is this WANO, which covers the world. We use their numbers, and we use the Lazard, which is an investment bank, and they don't have a dog in this fight, and showed that, one, you're only gonna make a 5%, 6% reduction if you spend $8 trillion on 1,000 nukes. And then there's the risk. We all, we've seen Chernobyl, we've seen three reactors melt down in Fukushima. In my career, that's better than a meltdown every 10 years. Is that a risk you're willing to take? My answer is no for two reasons. One is what's happening in Fukushima, that there's a public health risk. And the second thing is there's money to be spent, and there's a limited amount of money. It's best spent on the least expensive option that gets us the most electricity. And that's not so... And protects people the most. Because the nuclear industry, and this is what she has talking about it in part of her work, the nuclear industry makes a decision that X number of lives are disposable based upon the risk of nuclear power. And that's a given. You're not gonna see a windmill melt down, you're not gonna see solar collectors melt down and contaminate entire swaths of states and countries. You know, that's not gonna happen. What was the comment that Prime Minister Kahn made to you about almost losing Japan? Yeah, I can't remember it exactly, but Neodokan said to me and to the world, and also Gorbachev said that this is a technology that can destroy the fabric of society overnight. Gorbachev blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on Chernol, not on Karastroika. And, you know, Kahn clearly is of the same... He faced the destruction of his country probably within 12 hours if he didn't step in and force TEPCO to do the right thing. So this is not a technology that's very forgiving. When it goes wrong, it can destroy a country or, you know, even many countries, Europe, for instance, where there's, luckily Fukushima, the wind was blowing out to sea 80% of the time. But in Europe, these reactors are surrounded by people in other countries. So we're dealing with a technology that can destroy the fabric of society overnight. Okay. On that note, I thank you for returning to this program. And I ask you to return again. And it's one of the benefits of the pandemic year, which the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on the same date as the anniversary of Fukushima disaster. So March 11th to 2020. And here we are just past March 11th, 2021. So thank you, Arnie. Thank you, Maggie Gunterson. And thank you, Chihokanako, so much for returning to our program. And please, we admire your work so much and we need you. We need you. And our viewers need you when you keep us awake because it's so easy, and especially during the pandemic to fall asleep about this. Thank you for hosting us, Margaret, so much. And thank you for doing this work because you bring a whole coalition, both in Vermont and nationally and internationally to your viewers. And it's really appreciated. Yeah, and thank you. Well, I can't describe how much I admire your work. And Chihok, I just remembered some poetry from Paul Salon, the Holocaust poet, about your witness. And I'll just go off with that. Deep in times abyss amid the alveola ice dwells a sliver of truth, your irreversible witness, irreversible witness. That's what all of you are doing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye for now. Thank you, viewers, Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy.