This article was first published in 2012
A week after getting back from Fukushima, I found myself talking with three women in Bristol who were handing out leaflets and urging people to take action to stop the building of the new Hinkley C nuclear power reactor in Somerset. Their leaflet showed the evacuation zones if Hinkley were to suffer the kind of accident that caused fires and explosions at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Cardiff lies 20 miles away, across the Bristol Channel. At those distances from Fukushima, Japanese families with young children or women of child-bearing age have been evacuated. I saw their homes and schools standing eerily empty, with rampant weeds choking the play equipment and pushing through broken windows and greenhouses.
I visited Fukushima together with doctors from Australia, India, Britain, Germany, Canada, Finland and the United States. We had earlier been in Hiroshima for a meeting of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Our trip, which took a couple of hours by train and bus from Tokyo, was organised by a group of Japanese physicians (PANW), who had arranged for us to meet local doctors, farmers and politicians.
