Opinion Nukebathing By DOUGLAS LUMMIS	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
原子力浴 オイルをたっぷり体に擦り込んでゆったりした気分で日光浴をする…のは、昔の話。サンフランシスコの海岸でも、フランスのノルマンディー地方の海岸でも、オイルなんて持っていかなくても、浜辺には"茶色のオイル"がたっぷりある…。

One of my happiest youthful memories is of sunbathing. "Let's soak up some rays," we used to say. We would go to the beach, rub oil on our bodies, lie down and drift into a state of wonderful reverie.

Now there are beaches where you don't have to bring oil. You can oil your body just by lying down in the sand.

And there are beaches where you can soak up rays even on cloudy days, or at night.

A few months ago I was walking on the beach in San Francisco, near where I was raised. There were big blobs of foam on the sand, the size of dogs and cats. They were white like soapsuds, but when I touched one lightly, my hand was covered with brown oil.

There had been an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Not a big one. A sailor had mistakenly opened a valve on a military transport. The ship still had oil left on it from the Gulf War. "I didn't know that was an oil valve," said the sailor.

On the beach, someone said, "Just think, we fought the Gulf War to get oil. Now here it is. Lucky us."

My wife's family is from Mikuni, in Fukui Prefecture. The other day a cousin said to me, "Well, finally we've succeeded in making Mikuni famous." As I write, fishers and volunteers are fighting a losing battle to keep a massive oil spill away from the coast there, including Mikuni's beautiful cliffs at Tojinbo. A Russian oil tanker broke in two in the Japan Sea. A spokesman for the Russian government said he is sorry.

And now the respected British Medical Journal reports that children who play on the beaches of France's Normandy Coast are three times more likely to develop leukemia. Just west of Cherbourg is La Hogue nuclear waste center, which discharges waste both into the English Channel and into the air.

One newspaper said that the Journal's study "casts a shadow on an idyllic summer lifestyle ― one of children frolicking in the surf or building sand castles on the beach as their parents consume oysters plucked fresh from the seaweed."

Oysters, of course, are able to concentrate minerals from vast amounts of water. That's how they make their shells. So they are also very good at collecting in their bodies poisons from the water.

The mayor of the local town, Jobourg, said, "Most of the population has confidence in the plant's technicians." The mayor is a full-time engineer in the plant.

The French government said it would conduct its own study of radioactivity in the region. Since the French government is committed to the fiction that nuclear power is safe (80 percent of electric power in France is nuke) we shouldn't expect it to produce a study that proves otherwise.

So if you plan to go sunbathing on French beaches, prepare to soak up rays both from above and below. And the oil you find in the sand won't protect you from either.

Shukan ST: Jan. 31, 1997

(C) All rights reserved