nuclear-news

Grim health outlook for Fukushima nuclear cleanup workers

Children born to liquidator families were seriously affected with birth defects and thyroid diseases, including cancer, and loss of intellect. As for other children, based upon the work of multiple researchers, it is estimated that in the heavily contaminated areas of Belarus, only 20 percent of children are considered healthy,

Is the Fukushima nuclear plant breakdown worse than Chernobyl? | San Francisco Bay View, by Janette D. Sherman, M.D., 16 April 11“………Key to understanding effects is the difference between external and internal radiation. While external radiation, as from x-rays, neutron, gamma and cosmic rays, can harm and kill, internal radiation – alpha and beta particles – when absorbed by ingestion and inhalation release damaging energy in direct contact with tissue and cells.

There is serious concern for the workers at the Fukushima plant because of their proximity to the disabled reactors and to the fuel rods that have lost their protective cover of water. Some of the Fukushima workers, as with the “liquidators” at Chernobyl, are exposed to dangerous levels of gamma and neutron radiation.Those not in close proximity to those sources of radiation will be spared some of the intense exposure but will not escape the exposure from radionuclides that emit alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma radiation. These enter the bodies of humans by inhalation and ingestion of food and water.

Of the Chernobyl “liquidators,” the young and healthy men and women who worked to stop the fires and to contain the release of radioactivity from Chernobyl, by 2005, some 125,000 – or 15 percent – of the estimated total of 830,000 were dead, mostly from circulatory and blood diseases and malignancies.

Children born to liquidator families were seriously affected with birth defects and thyroid diseases, including cancer, and loss of intellect. As for other children, based upon the work of multiple researchers, it is estimated that in the heavily contaminated areas of Belarus, only 20 percent of children are considered healthy, placing an enormous burden upon governmental resources to provide medical care and education for those affected….

Is the Fukushima nuclear plant breakdown worse than Chernobyl? | San Francisco Bay View

April 16, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - Fukushima 2011, employment, health, Japan