The myth of cows | Guest Opinion

Seattle play takes poetic license, fuels nuclear fear

I recently participated in a post-show panel discussion in Seattle. When asked, “What resonates most about this play?” the assistant director for Lucy Kirkwood’s Tony-nominated The Children responded, “The death of the cows.”

The play’s slow-moving script made for an emotional moment when Robin, performed by Hamilton Wright, after days of covering up the truth, confessed to his wife Hazel, played by Jeanne Paulsen, that Hazel’s beloved cows were dead. Their demise — eventually implied for all of the characters — is caused by lethal radiation from a Fukushima-type nuclear accident on the English coast that produces slightly-worse-than Chernobyl-like results.

For ticket-holders who did not know what they were getting into, no worries. A lobby banner with the headline, “An Accidental Disaster,” provided the storyline. At greater length, it also explains the Fukushima crisis, described accurately as causing “a level 7 nuclear emergency, on the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl accident.”

The banner doesn’t reveal that Fukushima released only a fraction of the radioactive material spewed forth by the egregiously ill-conceived Chernobyl reactor. According to the World Health Organization, the highest recorded dose rate outside the Fukushima facilities is too low to cause a public health risk.

The banner highlights contaminated water, soil remediation and evacuation, yet omits the prevailing science behind these issues.

According to Tri-Cities scientist Jim Conca, diluted and pre-treated tritium-laced water is no more radioactive per gallon than a bag of potato chips; it can safely be released into the ocean. The Japanese government is also relocating billions of tons of topsoil from the exclusion area that scientists say is safe, but residents want gone, to potentially use elsewhere as landfill for public parks. And an overly aggressive evacuation of people — both in scope and duration — has come under scrutiny.

In 2016 Japanese prosecutors linked the chaotic evacuation of more than 100,000 area residents to 44 deaths. These were mostly the infirm and bedridden, abandoned in their homes by fleeing caregivers, left to die of dehydration or hunger. Recent government figures place evacuation-related fatalities — none from radiation — at more than 2,200, including 85 suicides.

Pets and livestock were also left behind. Cows in the exclusion zone that didn’t starve to death — about 1,400 — became “commercially worthless.” By government order, another 1,500 were put down by lethal-injection. None died from radiation poisoning. In fact, thanks to the affection of a group of farmers who chose to defy government instructions, as of 2016 about 200 cows still survive.

Like Hazel’s stage cows, farmers view these exclusion-zone animals as family. Similar to Wright’s character, Robin, a small group of farmers have traveled into the zone several times weekly since the accident to feed their cows.

The key difference is that the fictional Robin secretly buries his cows. The Japanese farmers are not only nourishing their herds, they’ve placed them into a university study to track their health in hopes of preventing future unnecessary euthanizations.

Farmers call them “the cows of hope.”

The general public, however, tends to be less hopeful. That’s because most of us lack familiar reference points for benchmarking radiation levels, leading to “the Godzilla effect” — the perpetual fear of cancers, birth issues, food chain contamination and other radiation-based health scares.

Kirkwood chooses to leverage this psychosocial anxiety through ‘the cows of hopelessness.’ Her dead cows are framed in a façade of reality to propel her narrative of nuclear energy fear and despair into the emotions of her audience.

“No one [at Fukushima] was killed by radiation,” according to the New York Times, “because levels outside the plant itself were too low.” The worst affected areas as of 2016, according to CNN, radiate 50 millisieverts per year. That’s precisely the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s dose limit, with significant safety margins built in, for U.S. nuclear industry workers.

The theater banner’s most contextually odd omission is of the more than 18,000 people who died that day. Entire grade schools were washed to sea. The real disaster — from the tsunami, not Fukushima — is a human tragedy of such massive proportion that it’s difficult to wrap our emotions around it.

Perhaps someday a gifted playwright will tackle that challenge.

For now, we’re left with the sad cow experience on stage.

This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 12:10 PM.