Radiation sucks

Martin Fackler has an article in The New York Times about the situation in Japan:

The mayor of Iitate sprang into action the moment he heard that scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were in the village hall’s parking lot. He rushed outside to confront the group, three Europeans and a Japanese, who wore surgical masks and cloth booties as they waved around a Geiger counter.
“Who gave you permission to come here?” the mayor, Norio Kanno, yelled at the four, chasing them into a van with the markings of the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog agency. “You are causing trouble for us!” Such public confrontations are rare in rural northern Japan, which has borne last month’s deadly earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis with stoic reserve. But fear and frustration are on the rise in this small farming community, which has gained unwanted notoriety as Japan’s radiation village.
Iitate (pronounced EE-tah-tay) has felt itself under siege since the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station showered the village with far higher levels of radiation than neighboring communities. Although Iitate’s inland location helped it escape the earthquake and tsunami with little damage, villagers blame an unfortunate combination of winds and the shapes of the mountains for channeling radioactive fallout from the plant, 25 miles to the southeast.
According to the village’s own measurements, the amount of airborne radiation was 6.75 microsieverts, down from the levels of more than 10.0 two weeks ago, but still more than one hundred times normal radiation levels, the village said. The Japanese government says that is not high enough to pose a health risk. But a Japanese university team advised all pregnant women and young children to leave the village.
Since the nuclear crisis began, about half of Iitate’s 6,200 residents have fled of their own accord, though a few have returned to their homes as the plant has appeared to avoid a full-scale meltdown. Those who remained say a lack of clear guidance from the national government, and the sometimes contradictory assessments of the danger levels by outside experts like the atomic energy agency, have left them confused and scared about the fate of their village. “If our soil has been contaminated, then agriculture here is dead. Iitate will become one big abandoned field,” said Kenichi Hasegawa, who, like many farmers in this dairy-producing region, lives in a wooden, tile-roofed farmhouse overlooking long sheds filled with cows. Mr. Hasegawa, 58, said radiation worries had already forced him to throw away eleven tons of milk, worth about $12,000, by pouring it into a hole he dug in a field. He said if the nuclear crisis continued, as many experts predict it will, he would be bankrupted in two or three months. Yet he said he was determined to stay on this 62-acre farm, nestled in a gently winding valley between rocky hills. He said fears of radiation had prompted him to send many in his family, including his two-year-old granddaughter, to the relative safety of suburban Tokyo. He cast his decision to stay as not just devotion to the land where he grew up and a reluctance to abandon his cows, but also an act of defiance against the powerful government and corporate elite, whose hubris he blames for the crisis. “The country, the prefecture, Tokyo Electric; for years, they all told us that the nuclear plants were ‘safe, safe, safe,’ ” he said, angrily. “I will stay here until the Self-Defense Forces drag me away by my arm,” he added, referring to Japan’s military. In fact soldiers are stationed nearby, just in case Iitate must be evacuated, village officials say.
That appeared to be a real possibility just a few days ago, when the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iitate’s levels of radioactive iodine had exceeded one of its criteria for evacuation. But then Iitate seemed to get a reprieve over the weekend, when the agency said radiation had fallen below evacuation levels.
Yet instead of relief, the apparent reversal stirred outrage. Mayor Kanno explained the parking lot clash by saying that he was fed up with contradictory information about the radiation risks. He said he had also harangued a delegation from Tokyo Electric, the utility that runs the stricken plant, when it visited several days ago to apologize.
Such anger at Tokyo Electric is widely shared in Iitate, where many say they believe that the company has covered up the actual size of the accident. Many also fumed that they were being made to suffer for troubles at a plant that did not even power their community. “We have been sacrificed so that Tokyo can enjoy bright lights,” said Takao Takahashi, 68, a tobacco farmer.
Mr. Kanno said that he was not trying to ignore the dangers, and that he felt that his village was “not completely safe”. But he also said that without a clear-cut criterion for evacuation, he was reluctant to tell villagers to leave, because that would take them away from their farms and livelihoods, and force them to live in evacuation centers in distant, unfamiliar places. “I don’t want to be remembered as the mayor who risked his people’s lives by not evacuating,” said Mr. Kanno, who said he had lost sleep and weight agonizing over whether to stay. “I want us to be remembered as the little village that didn’t give up.”
That fighting spirit was evident in Iitate’s small village hall, which had been operating in crisis mode since the earthquake: employees with helmets skirted stacks of food, batteries, and other emergency supplies that filled the darkened hallways. Other villagers blamed a lack of national guidelines on safe radiation levels for creating hysteria about the village’s risks. Many worried that even if the village was deemed safe, local farmers would find their products shunned by consumers afraid of radioactive contamination. “We spend a lot of our time trying to stamp out rumors and misinformation,” said Takashi Kobayashi, an official in the village hall’s makeshift disaster response headquarters.
To try to get a clearer picture of radiation levels, the village has begun measuring radiation in tap water, and in the air above the village hall parking lot. But in some cases these efforts seem to have had the opposite effect, by adding to a stream of numbers that has already baffled many villagers, including those involved in the measurements. “To be honest, I don’t know what these numbers mean,” said a village employee who jotted down the readings on a clipboard, and declined to give his name. “I just hope they will somehow be useful in the future.”
The confusion is also apparent among farmers, whose conversations are filled with references to millirems and microsieverts, the units of measuring radiation. “If it’s 100 microsieverts, maybe we can still work outside,” Mr. Takahashi, the tobacco farmer, told a group gathered in the lobby of the village hall.
“What about more?” asked Zenjiro Otoi, 67, a dairy farmer. “Does that mean we get sick?”
“We used to be famous for being one of the most beautiful villages in Japan,” Mr. Otoi said later. “Now we are becoming famous as one of the most dangerous.”