Ionizing Radiation and Health: What we all should know today

O.I. Timchenko

Marzeyev Institute of Hygiene and Medical Ecology, Ukrainian National Academy of Medical Sciences Kiev, Ukraine

39

Foreword

What lessons should people learn from the Fukushima catastrophe? What message and heritage should be handed to future generations on the nuclear catastrophe?
The post-Fukushima issue is not a simple question of alternatives, such as pro- or anti-nuclear power generation. The catastrophe and post-catastrophe management critically raised a series of questions to rethink modernity, namely, the relationships between science-technology and civilization, science and politics, the natural environment and society, government and citizens, locality and the globe, international society and nation state, culture and spirit, and so on. These questions should be shared by overseas colleagues to look for answers. The most urgent issue is the evacuees in Fukushima, whose number is still, at least, as many as 150 thousand according to the Reconstruction Agency of Japan. The number must be much more, including those who evacuated themselves voluntarily. The full account might be 190-200 thousand or more. Most of the evacuees, having been of large families in their rural homeland, now live separately in small temporary housing in urban or suburban areas with no certain perspective of their destiny, to the old homeland or a new one. Their destiny depends on the number of a so-far totally unknown unit of measurement, the sievert, milli-sievert, or micro-sievert.

A nuclear disaster is a war against an invisible enemy. People, seeing and hearing foreign accounts of the number of sieverts every day in the media, still remain almost illiterate about it, though having full information. Information must develop into knowledge.

Twenty-five years before the Fukushima accident, the Chernobyl disaster happened in the Soviet Union. Almost all Japanese were severely shocked at that time; however, as time passed, they forgot it. Focus on the catastrophe turned to other business. As a result, the people learnt no lessons from it. In the Chernobyl region, however, the people have been facing post-disaster aftereffects and radiation exposure all the time since the accident. Meanwhile, the SU collapsed, and the affected people’s destiny altered according to their new national belonging, that is, Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine.

41

The Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University recently launched a joint research project “Catastrophe and Rebirth of Regions after Disasters: Chernobyl, Ajka, and Fukushima,” and the aim of the project is to draw lessons from the disasters for the rest of the world and the future generations to fight an invisible enemy. This booklet is the first joint product for the public between scholars in Ukraine and Japan answering practical questions in an era of nuclear civil protection from an invisible enemy: exposure to radiation.

The author of this booklet is Olga I. Timchenko, senior researcher at the Marzeyev Institute of Hygiene and Medical Ecology, attached to the Ukrainian National Academy of Medical Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine. Her details are in the first pages of the contents.

Here, I provide a brief history of the booklet. In March 2013, I visited several research institutions of radiology in Kiev. The aim of the visit was to have a complex bird’s eye view on Chernobyl studies in Ukraine, and to pass the experience and knowledge to the Japanese, especially to the people affected by the Fukushima accident. Olga plays a leading role in the researches on the influence of radioactivity on the ecology at the Marzeyev Institute. She was the key person among those whom I met there, and I asked her to write a guideline essay on low-level exposure to radiation. Olga accepted it, saying, “With pleasure. The Ukrainian people are grateful to the Japanese people who helped the Ukrainian children. Now, it is the time for us to reciprocate.”

The booklet is full of experience and knowledge of the Ukrainian people, living a quarter of century after the nuclear catastrophe. It is indispensable for us. However, we have to develop their knowledge further on the basis of our own local experiences, because individual peoples and lands have their own physical and mental characteristics. As Olga writes, for example, balanced nutrition is essential to prevent the effects of radioactive doses. Then, we have to take into consideration the fact that diet differs greatly from nation to nation, or from area to area, and it can chronologically change within a nation or an area. The old Japanese diet of seafood is declining among the younger generation. This booklet, in any case, serves as a basic guideline to develop literacy against radioactive exposure.

42

I hereby express my deepest gratitude to Olga I. Timchenko. I extend my gratitude to Masumi Takaragawa, who is in charge of Chernobyl affairs at the Japan Embassy in Kiev, for her kind arrangement of my visit to Kiev in March 2013. Without her help, my stay in Kiev would not have been successful. Her family’s hospitality is unforgettable with Georgian cuisine, prepared by Uta, her husband.

Special thanks go to Tetsuji Imanaka, the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University, and David Wolff, the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University, for their many valuable comments on the Japanese/English translation of the original paper, written in Russian. The translation into Japanese and English from the Russian texts was conducted by Takashi Ieda, who otherwise helped me as an interpreter in Ukraine in March. All he did for this booklet was totally voluntary.

I, who supervised the translations, assume all responsibility, however. Any critical comments and suggestions are welcome.

I do hope that the booklet will help develop radioactive literacy everywhere in the world to fight the invisible enemy successfully.

Sapporo, November 2013

Professor Osamu Ieda The Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University

続きを読む »