2012/01/19

The IAEA Loves Women

The IAEA, having suffered a terrible year for its image, has taken refuge under the petticoat of gender politics to sell the notion "Women: A Driving Force in Nuclear Power Programs." Perhaps they have noticed that it is more often women who are the driving force in protecting their children and the human race from nuclear pollution. Something must be done about this gender gap!
If the IAEA wants to play this game, it is important to remember the female voices that have gone unheard by the IAEA and the global nuclear industry since the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Here is one such voice:

"I am not yet 32 years old, but I find myself in a hospital bed several times a year. And all of my four children (under 12) are also ill most of the time (they feel weak and listless, they have joint pains in arms and legs, their hemoglobin is below normal, they have enlarged thyroid and lymph nodes, headaches, stomach pains, constant colds). And it is the same in every family. 
We want to live. We want our kids to live and grow up healthy, and have a future. But through heartlessness, callousness and cruelty of those on whom our lives and the lives of our children depend, we are condemned to the worst possible fate, and we are only too well aware of that.... We have had to eat, drink and breathe radiation for years, waiting for our last day."

- Valentina Nikolaevna Okhremchuk, mother of four little boys, and all the mothers of Olevshchina.

Letter written to Soviet Union People's Deputy, Alla A. Yaroshinskaya, published in: 
Yaroshinskaya, Alla, A. (2011) Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment. Transaction Publishers. p. 197-198.

The situation would be a little less worrisome if the international community recognized the moral failure of the past, but it continues now with no expression of remorse. The Japanese government is working from the same playbook as the Soviets in their dying days of empire. Mothers in Fukushima are asking for the right to compensated evacuation, and this perfectly reasonable claim has been thoroughly ignored by the Japanese government. The international community, Japan's friendly allies and the IAEA give their quiet assent to this woeful neglect.

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