原発事故のしりぬぐいーNO.1 [原発・原発事故]
福島第一原発事故を受けて、２０キロ圏内の警戒区域から避難して未だに不自由な生活を強いられている避難住民。
時間と共にそうした避難住民の存在が世間から忘れ去られようとしている。
廃墟と化した警戒区域
イギリス経済誌エコノミストはそうした避難住民の実態や、警戒区域内に潜入して、原発で事故の収拾作業に当たっている作業員たちとのインタビューなどに成功、知られざる実態に迫ります。
この記事に付けられたタイトル、トワイライト・ゾーンーは、この記事を書いた記者が警戒区域に潜入して目にした別世界の事を表しているようですです。
記者が目にしたトワイライト・ゾーンとはいったいどのような世界だったのでしょうか。
★記事の冒頭では、警戒区域内に残された町の様子ートワイライト・ゾーンについて次のように述べています。
「このバリケードから先は全くの別世界だ。福島第一原発から２０キロ圏内は、許可のない車両は通行できない立ち入り禁止区域となっている。
この立ち入り禁止区域の中にいる人は、わずかでみんな幽霊のような真っ白い防護服を身にまとっている。３月１１日以降、町という町はみんな廃墟と化し、無人の家の玄関ドアには蜘蛛の巣がかかっている。道端には女性用のものとみられる赤みがかったカツラが落ちていたが、地震・津波・原発事故から逃れるときに落としたものと思われる。
福島第一原発から９キロ離れたところにある富岡町にあるナイトクラブ"Night Friend"の前で、(この記事の)記者は野生のダチョウと遭遇した。」
「報道陣は警戒区域内に入ることはできないことになっているのだが、好意的な避難住民がいて、中に入る手助けをしてくれるのだ。彼らは政府が自分たちの存在を忘れていることに腹を立てているのだ。
８９０００人いる避難住民のうち何人かは、１日だけ自宅に戻る許可が降りて、自宅に戻って箱に生活必需品を詰めて帰ってきた。部外者にとって、廃墟と化した地域の街の大きさや、最近の街の繁栄ぶりには驚かされる。今は黄金色の稲穂が伸びている水田のほかに、大規模な企業や、数百人の子供たちが通う頑丈な校舎もある。」
「パトロールカーが行き交う車両を止めている。警官が常に警戒しており、許可を受けていない者を日本最大の電力会社である東京電力の被災した原発に近づかないようにしている。秘密めいた様子は、原発の収束作業という悪夢のような作業に当たっている作業員に近づこうとする場合は特に悪くなる。作業員の多くは東京電力の正社員ではなくて、低賃金の契約従業員たちで、立ち入り禁止区域のすぐ南の方にあるいわき市内に宿泊している。」
「彼らを見つけるのは簡単だ。ナイロンのトラックスーツを着ているから。彼らは社会の貧困層から募集されてやってきたらしい。ある１人の男性が電話ボックスから電話をかけている。携帯電話を買う余裕がないのだ。もう１人の男性は、前歯がたった１本しかない。２人とも報道陣には話しをしようとはしない。彼らの労働条件については口止めされているからなのだ。しかし彼らも作業の安全性については心配しているのだ。放射能汚染されたがれきの処理をしている男性は、１日の日当は１５０００円だが、安全教育は３０分だけだったと話している。放射能の危険については、ほとんどテレビから学んだと話している。」
NO.2に続く
Cleaning up Japan’s nuclear mess
The twilight zone
Its owner fears not just radiation leaking out of the Fukushima plant, but also bad news
Nov 5th 2011 | IWAKI | from the print edition
IT IS another world beyond the roadblocks stopping unauthorised traffic from entering the 20km (12.5-mile) exclusion zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The few people inside are dressed in ghostly white protective suits. Town after town was abandoned after March 11th, and spiders have strung webs across the doorways. An old lady’s russet wig lies in the road, lost perhaps as she took flight after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Outside the “Night Friend” nightclub in Tomioka, 9km from the nuclear plant, this correspondent was confronted by an ostrich with a feral glint.
Journalists are supposedly barred from the exclusion zone, though sympathetic evacuees, many furious with the authorities about their state of limbo, help provide access. Some of the 89,000 displaced residents have been given one-day permits to go home and each collect a box of valuables. To an outsider, the size and recent prosperity of the abandoned communities is striking. As well as the rice paddies, now overrun with goldenrod, are large businesses and well-built schools for hundreds of children.
Patrol cars stop passing vehicles. The police are particularly vigilant in preventing unauthorised people getting near the stricken plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), Japan’s biggest utility. The air of secrecy is compounded when you try to approach workers involved in the nightmarish task of stabilising the nuclear plant. Many are not salaried Tepco staff but low-paid contract workers lodging in Iwaki, just south of the exclusion zone.
It is easy to spot them, in their nylon tracksuits. They seem to have been recruited from the poorest corners of society. One man calls home from a telephone box because he cannot afford a mobile phone. Another has a single front tooth. Both are reluctant to talk to journalists, because a condition of their employment is silence. But they do share their concerns about safety. One, who earns ¥15,000 ($190) a day clearing radioactive rubble at the plant, says he was given just half-an-hour of safety training. Almost everything he has learned about radiation risks, he says, came from the television.
A strict hierarchy exists among the workers at Fukushima. Tepco’s own salaried staff are in a minority. The firm employs a top tier of subcontractors, from the builders of reactors such as Toshiba and Hitachi. They, in turn, subcontract work to builders and engineers, who subcontract further, down to small gangs of labourers recruited by a single boss. Some lower-ranking companies may have ties to the yakuza, Japan’s mafia, and among the lowest-paid recruits are members of the burakumin minority, who have long been discriminated against.
Those on the lower rungs, say labour advocates, are particularly vulnerable. They often have no corporate health, pension or redundancy benefits. Hiroyuki Watanabe, an Iwaki councillor from the Japan Communist Party who is campaigning to protect Dai-ichi workers, has a document showing one worker’s accumulated radiation exposure. In two months it had reached almost 33 millisieverts, or a third the level normally permissible for those working on a nuclear accident in a year. Mr Watanabe reports many safety breaches. Workers wading through contaminated water complain that their boots have holes in them. Some are not instructed in when to change the filters on their safety masks.
Mr Watanabe believes Tepco is cutting corners because cash is tight. Even such basic tools as wrenches are in short supply, he claims. Tepco is shielded by a lack of media scrutiny. The councillor shows a Tepco gagging order that one local boss had to sign. Article four bans all discussion of the work with outsiders. All requests for media interviews must be rejected.
Those higher up the rungs appear to be treated better—though they, too, are sworn to secrecy. One engineer who has played a front-line role in helping cool the meltdown of Fukushima’s three reactors spoke unwittingly to The Economist. A swarthy man in his 50s, he had worked in nuclear-power stations for 25 years. Once he heard about the accident, he knew it was his duty to help, since so few people understood how to run reactor systems. He came to the Dai-ichi plant in May, despite family protests. Then, he said, the hardest work was done by the low-level labourers. They had so much rubble to clear, he says, that they often keeled over in the heat under the weight of their protective gear. Taken out in ambulances, they would usually be back the following day.
The engineer’s most stressful months, he said, were in June and July, once enough rubble was cleared to let him work on the systems. Seven-hour shifts usually involve an hour on and an hour off. Before he starts he must put on two sets of protective clothing, four pairs of gloves and a helmet with breathing apparatus, all of which is taped up so that not a particle of skin is exposed. At the end of every hour, he has to take off the protective layers and replace them with new ones before starting again. (Tepco says, with attention to finickety detail, that it has accumulated a mountain of 480,000 such suits in need of disposal.) During the busiest months, the hour-on, hour-off rule was foregone, the engineer said. “Though everyone is really trying their best, most of the Tepco guys in head office are clueless about what’s going on. No one has any idea of the conditions we’ve had to work under.” But then he added: “I’m not leaving this until I’m done. Never.”
The brink of bankruptcy
Government officials say some of the low-level safety breaches may be justified, given that Tepco is on a war footing and that its top priority is to stabilise the reactors. This week Yasuhiro Sonoda of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan drank a glass of water from the Dai-ichi plant in an attempt to play down safety concerns. On November 1st the government also said that it intended to invite journalists to Dai-ichi for the first time—though it muddied the message by discouraging women (for health reasons, it said, and because there are no women’s loos at the plant). The following day Tepco reported unexpected signs of nuclear fission in one of the stricken reactors, forcing it to inject boric acid against renewed radiation leaks. Tepco’s share price fell sharply.
The physical mess at Dai-ichi is mirrored in Tepco’s finances. A leaked plan drawn up with the government proposes to cut costs by ¥2.5 trillion over ten years. Government officials insist they will not let the utility cut corners on safety. But Tepco is already expected to lose ¥570 billion this financial year, rendering it barely solvent. The government was expected to confirm massive support of Tepco on November 4th, with a ¥1 trillion injection, mainly to help the 89,000 evacuees.
For those forced from their homes as a result of the disaster, compensation cannot come soon enough. But increasingly they are fed up with the shroud of secrecy thrown over the Fukushima plant and the abandoned towns and villages where families had lived for centuries. The less media coverage there is, the more they worry that their plight will be forgotten—and the less pressure there will be on Tepco to cough up proper compensation. That appears to be one reason some are starting to take the law into their own hands and smuggling journalists into the forbidden zone.
時間と共にそうした避難住民の存在が世間から忘れ去られようとしている。
廃墟と化した警戒区域
イギリス経済誌エコノミストはそうした避難住民の実態や、警戒区域内に潜入して、原発で事故の収拾作業に当たっている作業員たちとのインタビューなどに成功、知られざる実態に迫ります。
この記事に付けられたタイトル、トワイライト・ゾーンーは、この記事を書いた記者が警戒区域に潜入して目にした別世界の事を表しているようですです。
記者が目にしたトワイライト・ゾーンとはいったいどのような世界だったのでしょうか。
ーベールの闇に覆われた警戒区域ー
★記事の冒頭では、警戒区域内に残された町の様子ートワイライト・ゾーンについて次のように述べています。
「このバリケードから先は全くの別世界だ。福島第一原発から２０キロ圏内は、許可のない車両は通行できない立ち入り禁止区域となっている。
この立ち入り禁止区域の中にいる人は、わずかでみんな幽霊のような真っ白い防護服を身にまとっている。３月１１日以降、町という町はみんな廃墟と化し、無人の家の玄関ドアには蜘蛛の巣がかかっている。道端には女性用のものとみられる赤みがかったカツラが落ちていたが、地震・津波・原発事故から逃れるときに落としたものと思われる。
福島第一原発から９キロ離れたところにある富岡町にあるナイトクラブ"Night Friend"の前で、(この記事の)記者は野生のダチョウと遭遇した。」
◆続いて次のように書かれています。
「報道陣は警戒区域内に入ることはできないことになっているのだが、好意的な避難住民がいて、中に入る手助けをしてくれるのだ。彼らは政府が自分たちの存在を忘れていることに腹を立てているのだ。
８９０００人いる避難住民のうち何人かは、１日だけ自宅に戻る許可が降りて、自宅に戻って箱に生活必需品を詰めて帰ってきた。部外者にとって、廃墟と化した地域の街の大きさや、最近の街の繁栄ぶりには驚かされる。今は黄金色の稲穂が伸びている水田のほかに、大規模な企業や、数百人の子供たちが通う頑丈な校舎もある。」
◆原発作業員との対面は困難?
「パトロールカーが行き交う車両を止めている。警官が常に警戒しており、許可を受けていない者を日本最大の電力会社である東京電力の被災した原発に近づかないようにしている。秘密めいた様子は、原発の収束作業という悪夢のような作業に当たっている作業員に近づこうとする場合は特に悪くなる。作業員の多くは東京電力の正社員ではなくて、低賃金の契約従業員たちで、立ち入り禁止区域のすぐ南の方にあるいわき市内に宿泊している。」
◆安全教育はたったの30分
「彼らを見つけるのは簡単だ。ナイロンのトラックスーツを着ているから。彼らは社会の貧困層から募集されてやってきたらしい。ある１人の男性が電話ボックスから電話をかけている。携帯電話を買う余裕がないのだ。もう１人の男性は、前歯がたった１本しかない。２人とも報道陣には話しをしようとはしない。彼らの労働条件については口止めされているからなのだ。しかし彼らも作業の安全性については心配しているのだ。放射能汚染されたがれきの処理をしている男性は、１日の日当は１５０００円だが、安全教育は３０分だけだったと話している。放射能の危険については、ほとんどテレビから学んだと話している。」
NO.2に続く
Cleaning up Japan’s nuclear mess
The twilight zone
Its owner fears not just radiation leaking out of the Fukushima plant, but also bad news
Nov 5th 2011 | IWAKI | from the print edition
IT IS another world beyond the roadblocks stopping unauthorised traffic from entering the 20km (12.5-mile) exclusion zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The few people inside are dressed in ghostly white protective suits. Town after town was abandoned after March 11th, and spiders have strung webs across the doorways. An old lady’s russet wig lies in the road, lost perhaps as she took flight after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Outside the “Night Friend” nightclub in Tomioka, 9km from the nuclear plant, this correspondent was confronted by an ostrich with a feral glint.
Journalists are supposedly barred from the exclusion zone, though sympathetic evacuees, many furious with the authorities about their state of limbo, help provide access. Some of the 89,000 displaced residents have been given one-day permits to go home and each collect a box of valuables. To an outsider, the size and recent prosperity of the abandoned communities is striking. As well as the rice paddies, now overrun with goldenrod, are large businesses and well-built schools for hundreds of children.
Patrol cars stop passing vehicles. The police are particularly vigilant in preventing unauthorised people getting near the stricken plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), Japan’s biggest utility. The air of secrecy is compounded when you try to approach workers involved in the nightmarish task of stabilising the nuclear plant. Many are not salaried Tepco staff but low-paid contract workers lodging in Iwaki, just south of the exclusion zone.
It is easy to spot them, in their nylon tracksuits. They seem to have been recruited from the poorest corners of society. One man calls home from a telephone box because he cannot afford a mobile phone. Another has a single front tooth. Both are reluctant to talk to journalists, because a condition of their employment is silence. But they do share their concerns about safety. One, who earns ¥15,000 ($190) a day clearing radioactive rubble at the plant, says he was given just half-an-hour of safety training. Almost everything he has learned about radiation risks, he says, came from the television.
A strict hierarchy exists among the workers at Fukushima. Tepco’s own salaried staff are in a minority. The firm employs a top tier of subcontractors, from the builders of reactors such as Toshiba and Hitachi. They, in turn, subcontract work to builders and engineers, who subcontract further, down to small gangs of labourers recruited by a single boss. Some lower-ranking companies may have ties to the yakuza, Japan’s mafia, and among the lowest-paid recruits are members of the burakumin minority, who have long been discriminated against.
Those on the lower rungs, say labour advocates, are particularly vulnerable. They often have no corporate health, pension or redundancy benefits. Hiroyuki Watanabe, an Iwaki councillor from the Japan Communist Party who is campaigning to protect Dai-ichi workers, has a document showing one worker’s accumulated radiation exposure. In two months it had reached almost 33 millisieverts, or a third the level normally permissible for those working on a nuclear accident in a year. Mr Watanabe reports many safety breaches. Workers wading through contaminated water complain that their boots have holes in them. Some are not instructed in when to change the filters on their safety masks.
Mr Watanabe believes Tepco is cutting corners because cash is tight. Even such basic tools as wrenches are in short supply, he claims. Tepco is shielded by a lack of media scrutiny. The councillor shows a Tepco gagging order that one local boss had to sign. Article four bans all discussion of the work with outsiders. All requests for media interviews must be rejected.
Those higher up the rungs appear to be treated better—though they, too, are sworn to secrecy. One engineer who has played a front-line role in helping cool the meltdown of Fukushima’s three reactors spoke unwittingly to The Economist. A swarthy man in his 50s, he had worked in nuclear-power stations for 25 years. Once he heard about the accident, he knew it was his duty to help, since so few people understood how to run reactor systems. He came to the Dai-ichi plant in May, despite family protests. Then, he said, the hardest work was done by the low-level labourers. They had so much rubble to clear, he says, that they often keeled over in the heat under the weight of their protective gear. Taken out in ambulances, they would usually be back the following day.
The engineer’s most stressful months, he said, were in June and July, once enough rubble was cleared to let him work on the systems. Seven-hour shifts usually involve an hour on and an hour off. Before he starts he must put on two sets of protective clothing, four pairs of gloves and a helmet with breathing apparatus, all of which is taped up so that not a particle of skin is exposed. At the end of every hour, he has to take off the protective layers and replace them with new ones before starting again. (Tepco says, with attention to finickety detail, that it has accumulated a mountain of 480,000 such suits in need of disposal.) During the busiest months, the hour-on, hour-off rule was foregone, the engineer said. “Though everyone is really trying their best, most of the Tepco guys in head office are clueless about what’s going on. No one has any idea of the conditions we’ve had to work under.” But then he added: “I’m not leaving this until I’m done. Never.”
The brink of bankruptcy
Government officials say some of the low-level safety breaches may be justified, given that Tepco is on a war footing and that its top priority is to stabilise the reactors. This week Yasuhiro Sonoda of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan drank a glass of water from the Dai-ichi plant in an attempt to play down safety concerns. On November 1st the government also said that it intended to invite journalists to Dai-ichi for the first time—though it muddied the message by discouraging women (for health reasons, it said, and because there are no women’s loos at the plant). The following day Tepco reported unexpected signs of nuclear fission in one of the stricken reactors, forcing it to inject boric acid against renewed radiation leaks. Tepco’s share price fell sharply.
The physical mess at Dai-ichi is mirrored in Tepco’s finances. A leaked plan drawn up with the government proposes to cut costs by ¥2.5 trillion over ten years. Government officials insist they will not let the utility cut corners on safety. But Tepco is already expected to lose ¥570 billion this financial year, rendering it barely solvent. The government was expected to confirm massive support of Tepco on November 4th, with a ¥1 trillion injection, mainly to help the 89,000 evacuees.
For those forced from their homes as a result of the disaster, compensation cannot come soon enough. But increasingly they are fed up with the shroud of secrecy thrown over the Fukushima plant and the abandoned towns and villages where families had lived for centuries. The less media coverage there is, the more they worry that their plight will be forgotten—and the less pressure there will be on Tepco to cough up proper compensation. That appears to be one reason some are starting to take the law into their own hands and smuggling journalists into the forbidden zone.
タグ：原発事故 警戒区域
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