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Nuclear Accident In Japan Bombarded Area With Radiation
Findings by Greenpeace, scholars
Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times
Friday, October 8, 1999
(C)1999 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.commondreams.org/

Telltale signs of neutron radiation found in a gold bracelet, coins, leaves and household salt leave little doubt that people in the neighborhood of Japan's worst nuclear accident were exposed to a potentially damaging bombardment, environmentalists and scholars said yesterday.

``Of course the people who were within 500 (yards of the plant) were irradiated,'' said Hiroaki Koide of Kyoto University's Reactor Research Institute. ``The only question is the degree.''

The Japanese government has said that at least 49 people, 33 of them plant workers, were exposed to radiation last Thursday during a surprise nuclear fission reaction at a uranium fuel processing plant in Tokaimura.

However, the environmental group Greenpeace, after collecting its own samples of soil, leaves and household salt and sending it to a chemistry lab for analysis, announced that it believes several hundred people may have been exposed during the 20-hour crisis.

The group said it found the radioactive isotope sodium-24 in salt collected from private homes 175 yards from the plant and in soil collected 500 yards away. Though the isotopes have a half-life of just 15 hours and quickly fade away, they are the result of passing neutrons that travel through buildings, cars and human bodies, potentially causing DNA damage and increasing the risk of cancer in the long term.

Iodine-131 and iodine-133, evidence of radioactive fallout, were also found in leaves taken 160 yards from the plant, Greenpeace said. Japanese Agriculture Ministry data also reveal traces of radioactive iodine fallout but only in the immediate plant vicinity and in quantities the agency says pose no threat to agricultural produce.

Other evidence found by a private group of 40 scholars and researchers now combing Tokaimura and environs includes coins with a low level of radioactivity found in a bank about 350 yards from the plant and an irradiated 18-karat gold bracelet found about 800 yards away, the Asahi newspaper reported.

Science and Technology Agency data show that people immediately outside the plant fence at the peak of the accident could have gotten nearly a year's permissible radiation exposure in a single hour.

Neighbors of the plant, an unshielded building located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, are complaining vociferously that most people learned of the accident from news reports and were not told to evacuate or stay indoors until seven or more hours after the nuclear chain reaction began.

``They should have evacuated much earlier,'' said Greenpeace's Jan Rispens. ``They should have evacuated a larger area.''

Evidence mounted yesterday that numerous facilities in the Tokaimura area

--which is nicknamed ``Nuclear Alley'' and has 25 monitoring stations to keep tabs on its various nuclear-related industries and research institutes

--had ample and early data showing skyrocketing radiation levels at the privately owned JCO Co. plant.

The Atomic Energy Research Institute's monitoring station in the town of Naka, about three-quarters of a mile away, saw its neutron measurements leap to 0.26 microsieverts -- more than 20 times the normal level -- two minutes after the 10:35 a.m. accident on September 30.

Employees dismissed the readings as background ``noise'' until they saw TV reports of the accident later that afternoon. Some did call their families and warn them not to go out, though they didn't call local authorities, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported.

At an Ibaraki prefecture monitoring post in Funaishikawa, alarms went off three minutes after the accident began. The radiation surge was short-lived, but the boss did send a report to the prefectural government and the Tokaimura town office.

(C)1999 San Francisco Chronicle   Page A12