Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2012 May 30 - June 5 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Women in Miyagi form network to defend children from radiation

Women in Miyagi Prefecture, where the Onagawa nuclear power plant is located, on June 2 set up a network aiming to protect children from exposure to radioactive substances and do away with reliance on nuclear energy.

More than 300 women took part in the inaugural assembly of the network in Sendai City, the prefectural capital. They adopted an appeal calling for taking action to stop the restart of operations of idled nuclear reactors at the Onagawa NPP.

A participant from Kurihara City said that the city authorities began to detect radioactivity and to remove radioactive materials in cooperation with residents at their request. Another participant from Onagawa Town reported that townspeople have been conducting a signature-collecting campaign to decommission the Onagawa NPP. A woman from Fukushima Prefecture expressed her solidarity with the network, referring to the present situation in Fukushima where quite a few families were forced to evacuate and were broken up by the nuclear accident.

Hasegawa Koichi, professor of sociology at Tohoku University, gave a lecture at the assembly. He appealed to the participants to rise up in order to abandon nuclear power generation following the example of the citizens of Germany.

At the March 11 disaster last year, the Onagawa NPP came close to having a critical accident like the Fukushima Daiichi accident as 4 external power systems out of 5 were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami.