nuclear-news

In May, radiation safety researcher Toshiso Kosako tearfully resigned as a scientific adviser to Japan’s prime minister after the government decided to set the limit for exposure in schools at 20 millisieverts a year, a level usually applied to nuclear industry workers. “It’s unacceptable to apply this figure to infants, toddlers and primary school pupils,” Professor Kosako said……

Estimates of the radioactivity released by Fukushima Daiichi have also been revised sharply upward. The latest, published at the end of October by European and US scientists, found that the amount of caesium-137 that reached the outside environment was 42 per cent of the amount released in 1986 at Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster. (Caesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years, is the most hazardous long-term pollutant following a reactor accident.)
Westerly winds pushed an estimated 79 per cent of the caesium-137 out over the Pacific Ocean, with 19 per cent deposited on land in Japan and just 2 per cent ending up in other countries. Unfortunately, the wind changed direction for a day or so when the emergency was at its height – on March 15 radioactivity was carried in a plume north-westwards with substantial fallout in rain and snow as far as 50km from the plant.

Today, residents of Iitate and other evacuated areas are left with little idea of just how dangerous spending time there might be – or when their homes might be declared habitable. Some of the elderly have refused to leave – a rational choice given the low chance that their lives will be shortened by radiation-induced cancer but one that creates challenges for relatives and support services…..

despite the failures of monitoring in the early days, the crisis will yield unprecedentedly detailed information on the effect of radiation exposure in coming decades. There are plans to make Fukushima a centre of radiation safety research. The prefectural government proposes to monitor the health of the population of more than 2m, producing data for future study.

The conclusions should prove invaluable for global energy policy and disaster preparedness. Yet this is of limited comfort to residents stuck on the radiation front line, says a worker involved in the Fukushima City decontamination project: “It is not much fun being part of a medical experiment.”