Quezon City, Philippines -- Around one hundred Greenpeace activists and supporters called for an end to nuclear power during a candlelight vigil yesterday at the Bantayog Ng Mga Bayani shrine in Quezon City.  Volunteers hoisted a thousand paper cranes to express solidarity with victims of the earthquake, tsunami and the unfolding nuclear disaster at the Fukushima/Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.  The activity was held a month after the Japan’s worst nuclear disaster.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan.  The Filipino people are no strangers to disasters and understand deeply what the Japanese are going through.  They have already a lot to contend with the combined impacts of the earthquake and tsunami, it is unfortunate that they still have to focus attention and resources to a nuclear fallout instead of immediately concentrating on rebuilding,” said Amalie Obusan, Climate & Energy Campaigner of Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Environmentalists, artists and writers joined the solemn activities, which included an update on the situation in Fukushima prefecture where the Dai-ichi plant experiencing containment problems as a result of the earthquake and tsunami, is situated.

Following extended monitoring of the area outside the exclusion zone that surrounds the stricken Fukushima nuclear complex by two specialist radiation monitoring teams, Greenpeace called for the greater Fukushima area to be given official protective status (1), and for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from high risk areas in Fukushima City and Koriyama. The organization also called on the Japanese government to fully evacuate several radiation hotspots (2), including those engulfing towns such as Iitate and Namie, after analysis of data collected by the monitoring teams suggested widespread caesium contamination (3).

“With over one million people living in the greater Fukushima City and Koriyama area, it is not acceptable for the authorities to continue ignoring the seriousness of the situation,” said Greenpeace Japan Executive Director Junichi Sato, in Tokyo. “The government needs to not only provide people with clear advice (4) on how to protect themselves from the contamination threats, they need to start taking real and meaningful action by declaring the official protective status.  People in the greater Fukushima area could potentially receive radiation exposure of more than 5 milliSieverts per year, which was the threshold for evacuation at Chernobyl, following the 1986 disaster.”

Greenpeace radiation monitoring teams (5) recorded radiation levels of 4 microSieverts per hour in a playground in Fukushima City, and 2.8 microSieverts per hour at a shrine in Koriyama (6). These levels are high enough to expose people to the maximum yearly dose of radiation allowable in a matter of weeks (7). Soil analysis by Kyoto University (8) indicates that more than 80 percent of the radiation in these hotspots is from caesium isotopes, which will persist in the local environment for several years.

The Greenpeace teams also found radiation levels above official limits in vegetables collected from gardens near Fukushima City, Koriyama, and Minamisoma, and from a supermarket in Fukushima City. At least one of the vegetable samples taken from the region could be categorized as radioactive waste (9).

“If a nation such as Japan has to struggle in handling the effects of a fallout, then what more a country that is more ill-prepared for disasters such as the Philippines?  This nuclear crisis is a man-made disaster, the impacts of which will be felt for decades.  The smartest move for our country and governments around the world is to redouble their efforts to harness safe and secure renewable energy sources and invest in energy efficiency technologies,” said Obusan.

Greenpeace is promoting an Energy [R]evolution, that is the massive uptake of Renewable Energy (RE), coupled with comprehensive Energy Efficiency (EE) measures, and is proposing a target of 50% RE and 20% EE by 2020 in the Philippines.