In , while visiting Fukushima for the second time, I lost my cool over this issue. Why was the government spending billions trying to do the same thing with water near the plant itself? Was nobody in Japan familiar with mainstream radiation health science? At first the government scientist responded by simply repeating the official line — they were remediating the top soil to remove the radiation from the accident. I decided to force the issue.
I repeated my question. I started arguing with my translator. Then, at that moment, the government scientist started talking again. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was saying something different. The truth of the matter had been acknowledged, and the tension that had hung between us had finally broken. I understood his dilemma. He had only been the repeating official dogma because his job, and the larger culture and politics, required him to. Such has been the treatment of radiation fears by scientists and government officials, not just in Japan, for over 60 years.
There is no evidence that low levels of radiation hurt people, but rather than be blunt about that, scientists have, in the past, shaded the truth often out of a misguided sense of erring on the side of caution, but thereby allowing widespread misunderstanding of radiation to persist.
After Fukushima, Japan closed its nuclear plants and saw deadly air pollution skyrocket. The biggest losers, as per usual, are the most vulnerable: those with respiratory diseases, such as emphysema and asthma, children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor, who tend to live in the most polluted areas of cities. We know from in-depth qualitative research conducted in the s that young people in the early part of that decade were displacing fears of nuclear bombs onto nuclear plants.
Nuclear plants are viewed as little bombs and nuclear accidents are viewed as little atomic explosions, complete with fall-out and the dread of contamination. Worse, the notion that one could look at the design of a nuclear plant and declare it safer than existing nuclear plants is transcience at best, pseudoscience at worst.
To compare the relative safety of different kinds of nuclear reactors one would need decades of operational data, which don't exist for non-existent designs. And even then, one would likely need a lot more accidents and deaths to tease out any kind of correlation. But the cheapest nuclear is the kind that humans have the most experience building, operating, and regulating.
Slow, conservative, and incremental innovation is what has made nuclear plants cheaper, while radical innovation has made it more expensive. Was anything better for the U. Not a single nuclear industry executive would have said so at the time.
But in the decades since, many of them came to believe precisely that. In response to Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry stepped up training, checklists, and better oversight. The result was that nuclear plants in the U.
Anti-nuclear activists have long claimed that there is a trade-off between nuclear safety and economics when it comes to the operation of plants, when in reality the opposite is the case. With improved performance came far higher income from electricity sales. Might Japanese nuclear leaders look back on Fukushima the same way one day?
That depends on what they do now. For decades, nuclear leaders in Japan and the U. The official line is that the accident at the plant is winding down and radiation levels outside of the exclusion zone and designated "hot spots" are safe. But many experts warn that the crisis is just beginning. Professor Tim Mousseau, a biological scientist who has spent more than a decade researching the genetic impact of radiation around Chernobyl, says he worries that many people in Fukushima are "burying their heads in the sand.
In Soma, Mr Ichida says all the talk about radiation is confusing. There are many different ways to die, and having nothing to do is one of them. Safety Fukushima: workers are allowed to operate in the crippled plant up to a dose of mSv millisieverts. Chernobyl: People exposed to mSv were relocated. In most countries the maximum annual dosage for a worker is 20mSv. The allowed dose for someone living close to a nuclear plant is 1mSv a year.
Death toll Fukushima: Two workers died inside the plant. Some scientists predict that one million lives will be lost to cancer.
Chernobyl: It is difficult to say how many people died on the day of the disaster because of state security, but Greenpeace estimates that , have died from radiation-linked cancers in the 25 years since the accident. Exclusion zone Fukushima: Tokyo initially ordered a 20km radius exclusion zone around the plant Chernobyl: The initial radius of the Chernobyl zone was set at 30km — 25 years later it is still largely in place. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? To make room for more highly radioactive liquid, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric pumped tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific but stopped after the move was criticised by South Korea. Tokyo Electric appears to be no closer to restoring cooling systems at the reactors, critical to lowering the temperature of overheated nuclear fuel rods.
Japan's nuclear safety commission has estimated that the Fukushima plant's reactors had released up to 10, terabecquerels of radioactive iodine per hour into the air for several hours after they were damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. It said emissions since then had dropped to below one terabecquerel per hour, adding that it was examining the total amount of radioactive materials released.
A terabecquerel equals a trillion becquerels, a measure for radiation emissions. The government says the Chernobyl incident released 5. Fifty emergency rescue workers died from acute radiation syndrome and related illnesses, 4, children and adolescents contracted thyroid cancer, nine of whom died.
More than , people were immediately evacuated, and the total number of evacuees from contaminated areas eventually reached , The explosions that destroyed the unit four reactor core released a cloud of radionuclides, which contaminated large areas of Europe and, in particular, Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, and affected livestock as far away as Scandinavia and Britain.
Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to substantial radiation doses, including workers who took part in efforts to mitigate the consequences of the accident. The IAEA said the situation had been made worse by conflicting information, exaggeration in press coverage and pseudoscientific accounts of the accident reporting, for example, fatalities in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
The death toll from the tsunami is more than 13,, but no radiation-linked deaths have been reported and only 21 plant workers have been affected by minor radiation sickness, according to Japanese officials.
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