“Fukushima farmer hopes that ducks will eat up the radiation” -ABC Australia

Published: September 7th, 2012 at 10:58 am ET
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Title: Uranium’s long and shameful journey
Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation – Opinion
Author: Dave Sweeney, Australian Conservation Foundation
Date: Sept 6, 2012

[...]

The Japanese fixers organise to put human faces to the raw data.

A grandmother hosts us in her new home. The cluster of caravan park style cabins on tarmac are in every way a long way from her former life in a village. Her eyes light up and her years drop when she speaks of her three grandchildren and the three great-grandchildren due later this year. But then she is asked how often she sees them and the light fades. The interpreter stumbles, the room falls silent and we all look down and feel sad and strangely ashamed.

A doctor at a nearby medical centre tells how more than 6,000 doctors, nurses and patients were re-located there from the adjacent exclusion zone. People were sleeping everywhere he says before proudly showing the centre’s new post-evacuee carpet. As he talks a group of elderly people sit listlessly in chairs or lie in beds before a happy daytime TV game-show while the hill behind is criss-crossed with red tape that marks the areas of active decontamination work.

A farmer accepts that his current rice crop will be destroyed after harvest because it will be too contaminated. But he hopes next year’s might be better. I sit by a pond in his rice paddy as he explains his hope that if the ducks eat enough worms and grubs they might remove the radiation [Caption:  This farmer hopes that ducks will eat up the radiation via slugs and bugs. No one has the heart to correct him.]. No one has the heart to contradict him. Beside his house is a cedar tree that is 1,200 years old and his ancestors had the honour of supplying rice to the Shogun feudal lords.

[...]

Published: September 7th, 2012 at 10:58 am ET
By
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22 comments

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22 comments to “Fukushima farmer hopes that ducks will eat up the radiation” -ABC Australia

  • moonshellblue moonshellblue

    Great so they can spread radiation all over the ground as they tend to pooped everywhere. Hmm I don't think this is the technological break through required.


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  • moonshellblue moonshellblue

    Never mind I should have read the entire article. Lesson learned.


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  • This is so sad. My heart goes out to the people in Fukushima and Japan. They have lost everything. Their communities were destroyed by the tsunami and radioactive fallout. Some have lost all of their relatives. Their lives have been destroyed. Their security is gone. Everything they believed in is gone. They are in shock. In reality they have nothing to look forward to, so peaches, cherries, rice and ducks become a coping mechanism. They want to believe that life will go on. They NEED to believe that life will go on. What are these people supposed to do? We scream, "get out!" from our keyboards thousands of miles away as we go about our normal lives. It's easy to sit in judgment. I am certainly guilty of it, particularly when the incineration of radioactive waste began and the Japanese people were silent initially. I judge the high school students who couldn't Google "Japan" and "radiation" before their trip, because surely they would have found this site. They know better. But the people living in these excision zones with no hope for the future, what else are they going to do? Where will they go? They are filled with radiation and will likely die from its effects, as will a significant portion of the country. They have to eat. Does it matter if the die early or a few years later? How are they going to get radiation free food? Japan does not have the resources to import radiation-free food to feed the country.

    Just food for thought.


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    • kalidances

      They need hope not delusions that are going to place them into an agonizing death.They currently have zero appropriate medicine available to them for comfort care or prolonged exposure treatment due to Tepco's lies.

      You need to about the symptoms of severe radiation exposure. They have no idea what is about to happen to them.


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      • I know what will happen to them. I also know that after 18 months they have been exposed to so much radiation through air and food already that they are really the walking dead. They are like lepers – no one wants them. How many stars are holding benefit concerts to help relocate this population to a safer area? How many countries have opened their arms to Fukushima refugees? And who is going t pay for their cancer treatments?

        This is such a nightmare beyond my comprehension.

        My comment wasn't that I was condoning the action their actions, but that I can empathize with what they must be going through with the shock and I cannot blame or judge them for their actions. Besides, how long is it before the reactors with missing cores explode or #4 comes tumbling own falls and the nuclear domino effect takes place and Edgar Cayce is right – "Japan MUST fall into the ocean!"? I don't believe they should export their products outside of Fukushima, but if they are going to farm their land for the few remaining survivors, I can empathize. I wouldn't do it myself, but I feel for them. I am not judging them or their naiveté. I am just extremely sad for what is about to happen to this Creation.

        When Chernobyl was evacuated, there were many elderly who stayed behind, living in the woods. Everything they knew was there and they couldn't handle the concept of being a refugee, even in their own country. I was thinking of these people when I wrote my comment.


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        • kalidances

          I am judging. When you are a parent,any parent, you have a duty to do your absolute best for your child. I empathize too but there comes a point when loyalty and delusional thinking needs to stop. They need to understand that their lack of action is murdering SEVERAL generations of children around the world-not just theirs.
          So while this is horrible and I am terribly sad that this is happening to them, their inability to understand this is slowing the evacuation efforts.
          Tepco's lies are preventing them from seeking proper help so the refugees have to find a way to increase their efforts to obtain international assistance. We have to help them as well.
          At this point they will have to die there, again, in agony. So will their kids-all because people are telling them to be peaceful while accepting a fate no one deserves.
          They should be angry. They should judge this situation. They should act. That is all I'm saying.


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          • I know they should be angry. I am appalled that I am angrier about this situation than the people who are directly affected by it. I got a lot of flack when I went off about the silence of the Japanese when they incinerated radioactive waste and no one was protesting or saying a word. I would have left, but I wasn't born a Japanese farmer now in a state of shock, so I don't know how he feels. I do not believe the intentions of the farmers are evil, no matter how wrong it is to keep growing there. They are naive. The reality is that it is going to happen, no matter what we say, or even what Japan as a country says. Japan imports the majority of its food and its economy is on the brink of collapse. No matter how much I want the area evacuated and all activity ceased, it is not going to happen. They have nowhere to go and no solutions. Tokyo is next. They are desperate and they don't know any better because TEPCO, the Japanese government and the complicit media lie about it. The Japanese can take over the government and the offices of TEPCO, and then what?

            Everything that has happened is criminal. The reason I am so sad is that I can see how this is all unfolding. Soon humanity is going to face an ELE. Japan will be a modern day leper colony. The entire population has been doused with radiation in all forms. I am trying to empathize with (not condone the actions of) a population of refugees. If this is an ELE, we will all share the same situation soon.


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          • AFTERSHOCK AFTERSHOCK

            and you said it perfectly, kalidances…


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  • dosdos dosdos

    Each of us have fictions to protect us from that which is. Some of us are just more fictitious than others.


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  • norbu norbu

    How mean, cruel, I would not want our ducks to get radiation in there bodies, let Tepkill board of directors eat the worms!


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  • or-well

    The Tep-J-Gov-Co. Baby
    (soon to be created)
    will be appearing
    (photo-manipulated -
    to look more endearing)
    with a hayfork, in Farmers' clothes,
    telling the people food's free of rad-dose,
    beside a duck as big as he is
    saying "I raised it! In Fukushima – Gee Whiz!
    The future's in farming!
    Gigantism is nothing alarming!
    It's from growing food with Scientific Precision!
    Don't let Radiophobia influence decisions!
    Support Fukushima! Come back and help me
    grow food for our Nation! Be good Japanese!"
    The duck, animated and superimposed
    will give the baby a kiss on his nose.
    Shown to young school kids
    who are refugees in their own nation
    it will be promoted as "Education".
    Selected university educators
    will endorse it or end up working as waiters.
    The product of too fevered an imagination?
    So different from what happens now in that nation?


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  • CaMom

    Oh man. That is so sad. Poor guy has no clue.


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  • norbu norbu

    This the reason Tepkill has no $$ they are bribing all these people to say these thing's.


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  • TheBigPicture TheBigPicture

    Farmers have been providing food for tens of thousands of years. In the last fifty years, a few scientists and their employers decided to mess with life (developing and using nuclear). And they have gotten radiation on everything.


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  • Andres Arce Andres Arce

    Ducks and bugs would at least be affordable for Tepco and the government (both of which are as lunatic as this poor Japanese), instead of spending gazillion Yens for decontamination squads with just the same effectiveness.


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  • Sickputer

    A repost of Sweeny's story has a different picture showing several Fukushima NPP workers:

    Check out the 25-cent mask on the first and last man in the line of workers.
    The rest have double canister charcoal filters and full face plates.

    http://m.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/japans-radiation-catastrophe-was-made-in-australia-20120915-25zbb.html

    SP: I feel so sorry those workers are unprotected from fumes and dust. That is an indictment of how Tepco cares nothing for the suicide workers.


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