Peace Group highlights "dangers of nuclear power" at Littleborough's Festival for Fukushima

Festival for Fukushima

Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group highlighted the fact that 'we are all downwind of a nuclear power station' on Saturday.

On the sixth anniversary of the meltdown of three of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan on 11 March 2011, they joined the Festival for Fukushima organised by the ‘Strong Children Japan’ project founded by Littleborough-born artist Geoff Read and reiterated their call for a world free of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power-plants. They emphasised that nuclear power is expensive, dirty and dangerous, a target for terrorism and intrinsically linked to nuclear weapons proliferation.

On behalf of the group, Pat Sanchez said: “The Fukushima disaster was a wake-up call to us all about the unacceptable dangers of nuclear power. The stories of individual children affected by the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, so vividly illustrated by the Strong Children Japan project, bring home the dangers posed by nuclear power plants.

"When we remember the ongoing suffering of thousands of children and families affected by the Fukushima meltdown in 2011, it is frightening to note that the nuclear power station in Heysham is only 42 miles from Rochdale.

"This is perhaps even more chilling when we remember that in Japanese cities like Koriyama, which is about the same distance from Fukushima as Rochdale is from Heysham, levels of radiation were so high that most parents and schools could not allow their children to play outside at all, even though soil had been removed from many school grounds.

"We need to decommission nuclear power plants, as soon as possible; in Japan, in Lancashire, in Cumbria and throughout the our country and the world. We owe our children and grandchildren a nuclear free future.