By Maggie Gundersen

#NuclearSpringSeries: While the Nuclear [or Atomic – my preference] Power Industry, with its $200 Million infomercial budget, claims that nuclear power is safe, we beg to differ. Governments worldwide and the atomic power and weapons industries have vested interests in promoting nukes. Although untrue, these organizations claim that almost no one died or was made ill from the meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. They also claim that there are no lasting health or environmental impacts due to these five major meltdowns.

Fairewinds’ Arnie and Maggie Gundersen, along with our colleague and corresponding author Dr. Marco Kaltofen from WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), conducted a community-volunteer citizen-science project. That study “detected modest radioactive contamination at Olympic venues in Japan, and found significant alpha-, beta-, and gamma-emitter contamination at Japan’s National Training Center.”

Our peer-reviewed paper shows that Olympic sites in Fukushima Prefecture created for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics remain contaminated with a witches’ brew of radioactive isotopes. We even discovered plutonium at the Olympic J Village soccer facility. By the way, in case you did not know, Japan bid to host the Tokyo Olympics shortly after the three atomic reactor meltdowns in what it dubbed as Japan’s “Recovery Olympics”. At that time, Refugees from the meltdowns were living in temporary emergency housing following mandatory evacuation from heavily contaminated cities, towns, and farms surrounding Fukushima. Furthermore, to make Japan look good for the upcoming Tokyo [Recovery] Olympics, the government told evacuated citizens they must move back to their homes or give up their minimal government recovery stipend. These are abysmal choices. These meltdown refugees received minimal compensation, and now they are forced to move back to areas still radioactively contaminated.

While the Japanese Government spent considerable taxpayer money showing the world that Japan had recovered, it continued to fund the 50 other unsafe shuttered nuclear power plants. All the while, the people of Fukushima Prefecture and other contaminated areas waited for government assistance. They still wait for it today.

Entitled Radioactive Isotopes Measured at Olympic and Paralympic Venues in Fukushima Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan, the paper we co-authored with Dr. Kaltofen was accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science in November 2020. At that time, Fairewinds released the peer-reviewed article’s abstract and posted an overview of its results in less scientific jargon in Fairewinds Demystifying Nuclear Power Blog.

When we published the abstract with a post on Fairewinds.org, we promised our members to share the published journal article with you. You can read it here.

Our special thanks to publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc, who has released the entire journal article for public viewing. Anyone interested in reading and learning more about the complicated science of sampling radioactivity and the value of Community-Volunteer Citizen-Science may read this journal article on the publisher’s site, or you may view it below.

It is donations from readers like you that helped us fund this research at Olympic sites, so we are very grateful that Mary Ann Liebert has made this essential scientific research available to everyone. We would also like to thank the donors who helped make this happen. Without you, Fairewinds Arnie Gundersen could not have made three trips to Japan to work with and teach community-volunteer citizen-scientists how to do this work with us.

Most of all, our deepest appreciation to our colleague Marco Kaltofen, who has spent countless hours working with us, our citizen-scientists, and alone in a lab doing the intense testing work the samples we received require. Fairewinds sponsored Arnie and Marco for a joint trip in 2017 to meet our community-volunteer citizen-scientists and specifically gather samples from these Olympic sites.

Please read this valuable paper. A catastrophe like the one that occurred at Fukushima Dai-ichi could happen anywhere in the U.S. and in the world that has nuclear power reactors.

Arnie and I both came from the nuclear power industry. We were taught and believed that these reactors would be “too cheap to meter”, be efficient, safe, and clean. All of that is untrue.

Today, Arnie and I work to make things right. We want people to know that atomic power reactors are not a technology for our future. Worldwide, these aging reactors are unsafe, hugely expensive, and emit toxic radioactivity constantly while operating. Meltdowns and radiation disasters condemn host communities to lethal doses of radioactivity for thousands of years.

Did you know that plutonium and other highly toxic radioactive isotopes are lethal for more than 200,000 years? Can you even imagine that amount of time? I can’t.