Marshall Islands
Homeward Bound?
Rongelap’s “nuclear exiles” may be headed home. Their contaminated
A U.S.-funded $15 million nuclear cleanup effort at Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands is showing early signs that displaced islanders will be able to safely return home. Because of the success of the first phase of the cleanup, Rongelap leaders say they will go to the U.S. Congress early this year seeking additional funds to rebuild community and housing facilities that will make possible a future return for islanders after more than 15 years in exile.
Basic infrastructure is now in place at Rongelap from the Phase One work handled by Majuro-construction company Pacific International, Inc.: a base camp, with power plant; reverse osmosis water-making units; roads; and soon-to-be-completed paved runway and dock. Scientists now say that Rongelap can be safely resettled provided remedial measures are used. And U.S. government officials are heaping praise on Rongelap leaders for the “good progress” being made toward resettling the atoll.
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But the most difficult hurdle that Rongelap Mayor James Matayoshi faces as he spearheads the cleanup program is neither related to cleaning up radiation from nuclear tests nor mobilizing construction efforts on this distant, difficult to reach northern Marshalls’ atoll. It is ingrained attitudes of Rongelap islanders about the contamination of their home islands, attitudes that have been molded during nearly 50 years of distrustful relations with American government scientists and officials. Despite the large investment in rehabilitating the nuclear test-exposed island, it is not clear when or even if the majority of Rongelap islanders will choose to return to a home that was exposed to nuclear fallout in the 1950s. That’s also despite the fact that it is the Rongelap local government, not the U.S., which is driving the resettlement agenda. But, says Matayoshi, early in 2001 Rongelap leaders will be asking the U.S. Congress for additional funding to develop homes, schools and other facilities at Rongelap to facilitate a return home.
“We want to keep the momentum going,” he says, adding that the important issue for resettlement isn’t a need for the entire community to make a decision to return, but instead that individual families have the opportunity to make their own choices about resettling in a rehabilitated, rebuilt community.
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In 1954, Rongelap was engulfed in a cloud of radioactive fallout from the 15-megaton Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini, 100 miles to the west. Islanders on Rongelap at the time suffered a nearly lethal dose of fallout exposure and were evacuated for three years. U.S. officials who claimed the heavily exposed atoll was safe although the U.S. had done nothing to clean the islands moved them back to Rongelap in 1957. They lived there until 1985, when concerns over increasingly serious health problems—particularly thyroid tumors and cancer—prompted the islanders to move to a temporary home in Kwajalein Atoll, about 200 miles away. Scientific studies in the early 1990s bore out the Rongelap community’s worry, and the requirement for cleanup, which in turn led to the U.S. Congress establishing a $45 million resettlement fund for Rongelap in the late 1990s.
Matayoshi says that the Phase Two cleanup—and the future return of Rongelap islanders to their home atoll—depends heavily on the results of model areas on Rongelap Island employing a “combined” cleanup method to reduce radiation exposure. Soil was scraped to a depth of 30 cm and replaced with coral pebbles to reduce exposure to radiation in the soil in the living areas, while certain agriculture areas have been doused with potassium fertilizer—a preventive measure that in ongoing experiments at Bikini Atoll has been shown to dramatically minimize the uptake of radiation cesium 137 by coconut trees. Although official reports on the results of the Phase One remedial work are still awaited, the early indication from a broad spectrum of scientists is that Rongelap Island can be safely resettled.
Just what constitutes a “safe” or acceptable level may be a sticking point for islanders who by virtue of their experience are hypersensitive on the subject of radiation exposure. A 1994 rehabilitation agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and Rongelap Atoll Local Government stated the goal of reducing exposure to a maximum 100 millirems per year. Recently, however, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in Majuro has adopted a more stringent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limit of 15 millirems exposure for all cleanup areas in the Marshall Islands, saying that the Marshall Islands should be treated no differently from the U.S in establishment of safety standards.
Matayoshi treads lightly on the question of entrenched attitudes among his constituents, though it is a challenge he’s going to have to tackle soon. The Rongelap community needs to “take up the debate on the radiation issue” and carefully consider the information that is developing from the Phase One cleanup, he says, adding that the attitude among many Rongelap people can be described thusly: “Rongelap is contaminated, period.”
The question is, Matayoshi says, if all the scientists—including Rongelap’s independently hired scientific advisers—are saying Rongelap is safe, will people decide to go back? It is a particularly difficult issue because many Rongelap islanders believe that they have been used as guinea pigs by U.S. scientists and are highly skeptical of scientific pronouncements of Rongelap’s safety. This hasn’t been lessened by recent revelations that U.S. scientists seriously miscalculated the actual radiation dose the islanders received in 1954. Despite the difficult decisions ahead for Rongelap, U.S. officials are delighted with the progress. “We are glad to see that Rongelap Atoll Local Government is not only politically committed to resettlement but has also dedicated its resources and directed its daily operations to the resettlement effort,” says James Johnson, acting director of the Interior Department’s Office of Insular Affairs, in early November.
Will the U.S. Congress provide the $212 million that scientists agree is necessary to fund the entire cleanup of Rongelap Atoll? The money would go far to resolving a glaring legacy of the American nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands. Matayoshi is optimistic that the Congress will deliver on the U.S. promise to return Rongelap to a habitable condition, including cleaning up other islands in the atoll, so that people “can safely resettle the islands they historically used as residential islands and safely use resources on other islands.”
