7/25/2011 Japanese Nuclear Emergency Director: You Have No Right to a Radiation-Free Life

Source: Gizmodo
Date:  7/25/2011
by: Sam Biddle


This footage, from a recent meeting of indignant Japanese citizens and feckless Japanese government types should be a little shocking. Sadly, it's just more of the same—ineptitude and inaction. Buy denying the right to avoiding radiation? OK, shocking.

The Tokyo meeting was meant to broach the push to expand the evacuation zone around Fukushima—a zone that's proven inadequately and dangerously narrow. One Fukushima resident asks, "As other people do, people in Fukushima have the right to avoid the radiation exposure and live a healthy life, too. Don't you think so?"

A Nuclear Safety Commission Of Japan rep, when pushed to go beyond his canned non-answer, deadpans "I don't know if they have that right." The crowd reacts as you would expect when told they nuclear-threatened welfare isn't a concern. After being jeered at by the understandably outraged audience, and ignoring requests to test the radioactive content of young residents' urine, the government panel packed up and left.
If you could compress the past four months' anxiety, tension, crisis, inaction, confusion, and stifled anger into one meeting room, you'd produce the above, this smoldering radioactive diamond of national failure. [via Boing Boing]

Editor's Note: Here is a plea from parents in Fukushima City for an official evacuation order from the Japanese government. A must read if you have not already.

7/17/2011 Residents of Fukushima trapped in dangerous radiation contaminated areas due to lack of government evacuation order/aid