Taking the Lead with Lead-based underwear designed in Japan to help fight Fukushima disaster.

Taking the Lead with Lead-based underwear designed in Japan to help fight Fukushima disaster.(RT).

Designed in an effort to protect Fukushima clean-up workers, Osaka-based swimwear company Yamamoto Corporation unveiled the anti-radiation garments on Thursday.

The company claims that the wetsuit made from stretchy rubberized kneaded carbon can stop 100 percent of beta radiation.

The swimwear - which weighs only three kilograms - is completely fused so the contaminated water cannot seep through. The suit therefore protects the person wearing it from aftermath illnesses such as cancer, according to its makers.

Yamamoto Corporation is also working on lead-based underwear which protects the lower part of the spine and abdomen from harmful gamma rays. The underwear’s weight is 3.4 kilograms.


“The clothes which protect from two kinds of radiation - beta and gamma rays –as described above are the first development of such kind in the world,” the company said in a statement.

Due to be released in November, the wetsuit will cost just over US$1,000, while the underwear will cost around $825.

Meanwhile, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has suggested in a report that Japan’s government may have underestimated by 20 percent the internal radiation that cleanup workers received after the nuclear disaster occurred .

The UN committee also revealed that the tests conducted had failed to account for some types of radiation, adding that the nuclear plant’s employees were tested after a significant delay.


TEPCO, the plant’s operator responsible for the clean-up, said on Friday that radioactivity levels in a well near a storage tank on the Fukushima premises have immensely risen. The company detected 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances at the site - a level 6,500 times higher than readings taken on Wednesday, NHK World reported. The news comes as TEPCO struggles to cope with the aftermath of the nuclear disaster.Read the full story here.