Nearly six months after the devastating tsunami hit Japan, communities are turning to mother nature to help restore theirs homes and hopes. Millions of sunflowers have been planted in radioactive areas to soak up toxins from the ground and brighten the hillside of Fukashima.
Photo © inoc
The nuclear fallout from the tsunami forced nearly 80,000 people to evacuate their homes, not knowing if or when they may return. The 30 miles surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been left contaminated and relatively barren. Even more disturbing, reports of radioactive rice, beef, vegetables, milk, seafood, and even tea have been found more than 60 miles away from the site, outside the mandatory evacuation zone.
Koyu Abe, chief monk at the Buddhist Joenji temple has been distributing sunflowers and their seeds to be planted all over Fukushima. The plants are known to soak up toxins from the soil, and patches of sunflowers are now growing between buildings, in backyards, alongside the nuclear plant, and anywhere else they will possibly fit. At least 8 million sunflowers and 200,000 other plants have been distributed by the Joenji Buddhist temple. “We plant sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus and cockscomb, which are all believed to absorb radiation,” Abe says.
…brighten the hillside of FukUshima.
Japan, excellent in planning and implementation
I love sunflowers, but they don’t “soak up radiation.” When they take up radioactive materials, the radiation doesn’t disappear. If the sunflowers are composted (or their seeds are eaten) the radiation returns to the ecosystem. They need to be harvested and disposed of.
(This is different from the use of plants to absorb organic toxins such as hydrocarbons. In those cases, the plants may absorb and break down the compounds, rendering them nontoxic. But they can’t make radiation go away.)
This use of plants (“phytoremediation”) is useful and potentially beautiful, but you gotta know what you’re doing.
A very interesting article about sunflowers. How long is the crop time for a sunflower? How many rotations of sunflower crops will it take to clean up the soil? Will the soil ever be safe for human consumption of vegetables or rice? In refrence to above comment, what hapopens to the sunflower crop when harvested? Are the destroyed in an incinerator? It would be good to follow up on this story with facts and results. Thank You