The potential for disaster at nuclear power plants is the message of a "peace walk" that will take place around Lake Ontario and started this week in Onondaga County.
Jun Sun Yasada led a group of activists Thursday to begin their walk from the Onondaga Nation Cookhouse parking lot. Their steps will circle Lake Ontario in the coming weeks and months, hoping to bring the public's eye to the presence of nuclear power plants that ring the lake, and the potential danger that comes from them.
Jun Sun is from Japan, where the legacy of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster lingers.
"Many people are still suffering, under five years old, young people, more and more every day," said Jun Sun.
Sean Burton will be among what are called "peace walkers," and says there is an affinity between the Japanese people and Native Americans.
"A lot of nuclear waste and dump sites end up in some of these Native territories, and Jun Sun and the Japanese people have experienced first-hand Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, of course, the disasters at Fukushima Daiichi. So there seems to be a good common ground," Burton said.
Peace walkers will hope to speak along the way to people who live in the shadows of nuclear reactors about the impact of Fukushima on the Japanese people. Their walk this weekend will include a walk from Oswego to the three nuclear reactors in Oswego County.
"Nuclear reactors are weapons. Nuclear reactors destroy all human, all creature, all living…all waters, everywhere," said Jun Sun.
Organizers of the peace walk say that two of the reactors in Oswego County, Nine Mile Point Unit 1 and Fitzpatrick, are Mark 1 Boiling Reactors, the same kind that melted down in the wake of the Japanese tsunami last year.