nuclear-news

his has happened before, of course. Twenty years after the 1986 reactor explosion in Chernobyl, the World Health Organisation said psychological distress was the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident: “Populations in the affected areas exhibit strongly negative attitudes in self-assessments of health and wellbeing and a strong sense of lack of control over their own lives. Associated with these perceptions is an exaggerated sense of the dangers to health of exposure to radiation.” Russian doctors have said survivors were “poisoned by information”. But in Japan, it would be more accurate to say that people are contaminated by uncertainty….

The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to.

“Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that,” says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan’s leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact.

Unlike an earthquake, he says, the survivors do not suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms of insomnia, shaking and flashbacks. Instead, the radiation “creates a slow, creeping, invisible pressure” that can lead to prolonged depression. “Some people say they want to die. Others become more dependent on alcohol. Many more complain of listlessness.”

Sachiko Masuyama has suffered many of these symptoms as she has been forced to make life-or-death decisions for herself and her unborn baby.

On 9 March, she found out she was expecting her third child. Two days later, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant – only 25km from her home – was jolted into meltdown. And since then her life has been turned upside down, first by a desperate escape from the disaster zone, then by a growing worry about the effects of the radiation on the foetus growing inside her……

Nuclear and emergency workers were also in the dark. I drive to Iwaki, a coastal city south of the power plant, to interview one of the men involved in the clear-up operation. T-san was evacuated from Fukushima Daiichi plant after the earthquake struck and returned almost two weeks later to join the containment operation.

“They didn’t tell us anything,” says T-san, who has asked to remain anonymous. “Nobody mentioned a meltdown. We didn’t get any critical accident training or instructions. But we all knew the situation was very bad. I thought this might be my final mission. I know it sounds a little silly, but I felt like a kamikaze who was prepared to sacrifice everything for my family and my country.”

Since March, he estimates he has been exposed to 50 millisieverts of radiation. Under the government’s previous guidelines, this was the maximum allowed for an entire year.

He is not alone. By Tokyo Electric’s own figures, 410 workers have, like T-san, been exposed to more than 50 millisieverts since the disaster. Another six have received a dose above 250. But in an emergency move, that became legal in March, the government has increased the permissible dose for nuclear workers from 100 to 250 millisieverts.

“They changed it so suddenly and dramatically that we didn’t know what was dangerous, what was safe,” T-san says. “We were confused. Had the government been too strict before, or was it suddenly being too lax? We didn’t know what to believe.”….

The overall radiation release from the plant is staggering – 770,000 terabecquerels in the wake of the accident and a billion becquerels still being added each day while engineers struggle to seal the broken containment structure. Most of the iodine – with its eight-day half-life – has since decayed and the cesium and other radionuclides have been diluted and dissipated. But much has seeped into the soil, contaminated the leaves in the forests and is being passed through the food chain to cattle, fish, vegetables – and humans…