Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Be careful when purchasing a second hand car - it may have come from Iwate, Futaba, or other areas that were exposed to high levels of radiation

From The Telegraph:


Japanese dealers selling 'radioactive cars'

Unscrupulous used-car dealers in Japan are selling vehicles exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation to unsuspecting buyers

"The vehicles appear to be outwardly sound but were owned by people living close to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant when it was destroyed by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Others come from second-hand dealers in the north-east of Japan, with a report in the Asahi newspaper suggesting that a minivan that was originally registered in the town of Iwaki, on the edge of the 18-mile exclusion zone around the plant, tested positive for 110 microsieverts of radiation per hour. The Japanese government initially set a level of 5 microsieverts as the limit for cars to be exported to other countries, but in August tightened the rules to 0.3 microsieverts.

Dealers have long had a lucrative trade in buying up second-hand vehicles in Japan and exporting them to Russia and south-east Asia. But with those markets no closed to them because of radioactivity tests at docks, they have little choice but to dump them on the domestic market.

So far, more 660 cars have been refused export documents from Japan.

The dealer who purchased the notoriously contaminated vehicle from Iwaki did so in good faith at an auction for Y1.43 million (£11,737), he told the Asahi. Intending to transport it from Osaka to south-east Asia, authorities informed him that the minivan was more than 20 times the permissible radiation level for exports."


Japanese cars are often converted and then sold throughout Southeast Asia. I can see the Philippines being a target for these kinds of cars. Scary stuff.

1 comment :

  1. I wrote this is response to a new blogger who questioned why all the bad news, cant we have some good news to show how things are getting
    better.

    It is clear that things won't be "better" until we can
    extract this vampire squid called the nuclear industry from continuously
    injecting us with radiation. Until we can shutdown all the nuclear plants.....rest of the article is here

    http://oahutrading.blogspot.com/p/japan-nuclear-information.html

    ReplyDelete