Looking for an outstanding image this month, I didn’t find one. I found many.
On the 25th Anniversary of Chernobyl, as radiation continued to leak from the damaged reactors at Fukushima, activists around the world called attention to the danger of nuclear power.
With an Energy Shift march in Tokyo, amid clouds of Orange smoke in Brazil, with candles in Australia and India, crosses in Italy, masks in the Philippines, costumes in Hong Kong, a simple No! in Mexico and a projection onto the bland sarcophagus of the Chernobyl reactor itself, Greenpeace used creative techniques and the power of people to call attention to the fact that nuclear power is not a solution, it’s a big problem.
During April, a Greenpeace team took radiation readings outside the Japanese exclusion zone and found radiation levels that expose people in two weeks to the annual maximum allowable dose. The Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, arrived off Japan to investigate radioactivity in the marine environment, but has not been permitted to enter the 12-mile Japanese territorial limit where most of the fish and seaweed consumed by Japanese people are found.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission advised Americans to evacuate a 50 mile radius zone around Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant..A pretty frightening advisory considering that nationwide, 1 in 3 Americans lives within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.
by Sean Haines
