The six-year anniversary of the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan, was Saturday, bringing with it frightening tales of radioactive boars and wild pigs roaming the deserted streets of abandoned towns near where the plant melted down.
Nuclear radiation levels are so lethal at the plant site that a human would fall to the ground and die in as little as one minute, according to data released last week by the owner of the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima prefecture.
Japanese authorities, who are trying to retake the towns from the pigs, have begun sending in hunting parties to flush out and kill the radioactive swine. The boars’ flesh is too radioactive to be consumed, so the carcasses must be discarded as nuclear waste. There is a ban on eating the boars.
The hogs, however, have managed to use the increased radioactivity to their advantage in making human habitats their own, according to the Independent newspaper.
“It is not really clear now which is the master of the town, people or wild boars,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of the town of Namie, only a few miles from the power plant site. “If we don’t get rid of them and turn this into a human-led town, the situation will get even wilder and uninhabitable.”
Japan is slated to lift the six-year-old evacuation order for the town and a number of other residential areas that are less than three miles from the Daiichi nuclear plant.
