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I think we all agree on the fact that we're better off than 100 years ago,
and that no one wants to turn back.
But it is our right to know what risks we are running by doing a certain thing,
and to be able to trust the people who keep us informed.
On the Chernobyl accident, very thorough, in-dept studies have been carried out,
and at the end the official data say those who died, died,
those who got sick, got sick, and the problem is limited.
But there are those who, having taken part in the same studies,
say that we will suffer the consequences for the next 20 generations;
the information is not known because the atomic agency censored it.
The WHO says it's a lot of bull.
A clue to how things probably went can be found in a conference held in Kiev in 2001.
Lugano.
An Italian-Swiss television journalist of Russian origin, Wladimir Tchertkoff,
filmed that WHO-IAEA conference in Kiev in 2001.
We stumbled across the proof by a miracle,
and it is that there in Kiev, Japan's Hiroshi Nakajima,
the top person in charge at the WHO in 1995,
was appointed Honorary Chairman of the Kiev conference.
He was there.
And what did he say?
I said to myself, we have to ask him the question.
KIEV CONFERENCE, 2001:
“Why haven't the conference proceedings been published?”
“Because it was a conference organized with the IAEA: this was the problem.”
“And don't you consider the connection between the WHO and the IAEA
a contradiction for the full freedom of the WHO?”
“The IAEA is under the Security Council of the United Nations,
and we, like all the specialized agencies, are under the Social Development Council.
It's not that there is a hierarchical relationship among the organizations:
we are all equal, but for military and civilian atomic affairs they are the authority.
They are the ones who are in command.”
In short, it is not possible to sell the civilian
nuclear sector if there is talk of long-term damage to man and to the environment,
in the case of both major accidents and normal conditions,
with its weak, legal emissions.
The acceptable risk threshold.
But has the World Health Organization conducted a study on the
day-to-day exposure of the population that resides near the nuclear plants?
There are IARC studies, OK?
The organization has a research center called the IARC,
International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France.
At that agency, which is part of the WHO, as a research agency,
they have the studies that show the impact variations of small radiation doses.
The WHO coordinates a study of this kind?
On the impact of radioactivity on the human genome?
You should ask the IARC;
the research and research coordination part is done directly by the IARC.
IARC: International Agency for Research on Cancer.
It is part of the World Health Organization.
I write to them.
Hello, I'm a journalist from “Report”…
and I ask them to provide me with this study on the exposure of
persons who live near nuclear installations to weak doses of radioactivity.
The reply arrives: No, there is no such study of this type at this center.
I thank them and ask about the study on damages to the human genome,
also due to the weak doses of radioactivity.
The reply:
No, there is none. Sorry. Sincerely… etcetera, etcetera.
We found these studies in Germany.
In 2002 the Schroeder government passed a law stating that as the
reactors progressively reach the end of their operational lifetimes,
they will be shut down and never replaced.
The following government, under Angela Merkel,
decided to look into the normal life around the plants, and ordered a health study.
This is the area of Kruemmel.
We are within a radius of 5 kilometers and the disease levels are four times
higher than average.
We have seen that among the inhabitants of the area around the nuclear plants there
are relatively high leukemia rates, especially among children.
The risk is expressed by the value one divided by the distance.
The closer a child lives to a plant, the higher the risk that he will come down
with leukemia and other tumors will be.
What do you say to those who tell you there is no causal connection?
At the end of the study I confirmed it clearly:
we have such epidemiological evidence that the cause-effect relationship
is the most probable explanation.
Unless there is another cause unknown to us.
Kruemmel nuclear plant on the Elbe River,
midway between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.
It is here that there is the highest leukemia rate among children.
Scientists have also tried excluding this site from the study
to verify whether it was Kruemmel that raised the national average.
But the children's leukemia rate still remained high on German territory.
I am of the opinion that leaving doesn't solve the problem.
Other families will come live here.
Our duty is to let people know that life here is dangerous.
Already for a long time before the study, we were looking for explanations,
but we never obtained anything, just a lot of politics that hides, removes,
and doesn't talk about it.
It's like feeling continuously threatened because in the end you realize
that in the event of an accident,
we would be the last to find out about it.
Like what happened in the summer of 2007.
The reactor's transformer room caught fire and for us, the population involved,
there was only confusing information.
Nuclear plants produce waste.
Radiotoxic wastes which, in order to no longer do any harm to man and the
environment, need time:
hundreds, thousands, millions of years, depending on the type.
Where are they put?
Let's say that in the meantime we are making do: some are kept in the plants,
some underground, somewhere but always temporarily, awaiting a final destination,
where geology and human beings cannot rebel.
Châtenay-Malabry, just outside Paris.
ANDRA: National agency for the management of radioactive wastes.
Here they have asked themselves an embarrassing question:
what if a future civilization loses memory of the fact that once upon a time
electricity was produced by nuclear reaction, and accidentally frees those wastes?
They are searching for an answer.
Imagine that there's a war, a major cataclysm...
it might happen that the installation that was planned to be overseen no longer is,
and it progressively becomes an abandoned wasteland.
So it is necessary for people to know that there are radioactive wastes there.
And if here, where the French are storing their radioactive wastes,
in a few hundred or thousand years someone who doesn't know it bores a hole,
what might happen to that future civilization?
All right! If they bore a hole hundreds of meters deep
and bring nuclear wastes up to the surface,
of course it would be dangerous for human beings.
What is your line of work?
We hold conferences, organize tours of our installations so people have the knowledge
and pass it down to their descendants.
But there is no guarantee that this method may hold up for 3 or 5 centuries;
there's a risk that, at some time, the information flowmay be interrupted.
For this reason we have prepared two memos which we refer to as “passive”,
that is, they do not depend on a dialogue among people:
we have written them in a language that is readable for practically everyone.
I think that a few centuries from now French as we know
it will still be spoken and understood,
but in 500 or 600 years, will the same French or English still be spoken?
In this case we are evaluating the possibility of creating symbols
on supports that we call surface markers: putting vertical signs on the storage site
with a certain amount of information provided through symbols,
which say that 500 meters below there are radioactive wastes.
Why not?
But are you sure that there can be symbols
that are capable of crossing time with the same meaning?
At the present time there are no answers.
We're studying. The memory of the geological storage site is
not something we have to develop for tomorrow,
next year, or two years from now.
We have more than a century ahead of us to reflect;
today we are just at the beginning of this reflection.
Germany.
There was no need to await any future generation.
Roads of Lower Saxony, the zone of the mines of Asse;
Hanover is not very far away.
Can you see those “A's” in the middle of the fields?
They stand for “aufpassen”: Warning -contamination from Cesium-137.