Symposium 2013 Ian Fairlie

Assessing long-term Health Effects from Fukushima’s Radioactive Fallout – Dr Ian Fairlie

“…..Fukushima’s second anniversary in March 2013 is an opportune moment to assess its likely long-term consequences, although the accident is by no means over given the precarious state of the four wrecked reactor buildings – especially the spent fuel pond at Unit 4.

The figure below (reproduced from the French Government’s Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN 2011)) indicates the extent of the radioactive fallout from Fukushima’s explosions and gaseous emissions in areas near Fukushima. In addition, lower concentrations fell over other areas of Japan, over neighbouring countries and eventually circulating the Northern Hemisphere.

Exposure to radioactive fallout will result in radiation doses to the people living in these areas and this post will attempt to estimate future cancer deaths arising from these doses. Population doses are usually termed collective doses…….

First, it is important to realise that air emissions from Fukushima are much more important, in terms of health effects, than Fukushima’s sea discharges…….

In areas near Fukushima, most of the long-term dose to the public originates from Cs-134 and Cs-137 isotopes which fell from Fukushima’s plumes to the ground. These have longish half-lives (2 years for Cs-134 and 30 years for Cs-137) and they irradiate people with gamma and beta rays. This is called groundshine. Smaller doses originate from being immersed in the plume, from eating contaminated food and drinking contaminated water. In areas further away, the situation is reversed with most of the dose coming from ingestion and lesser amounts from groundshine…….

It’s important to realise that the use of 2.4 and 38 year soil weathering half lives means that groundshine doses from Fukushima (and Chernobyl) last more than 70 years – ie a lifetime. Many scientists remain unaware of this implication but it is based on good evidence.

The dose consequences are shown in graphical form in figure 1 below (reproduced from Beyea et al, 2012) which shows that, after 75 years, the total collective dose from groundshine is about 6.5 times greater than the groundshine dose received in the first year. Unfortunately the recent second WHO (2013) report on the health risks from Fukushima used a factor of 2 and not 6.5: one of a number of deficiencies in its report.

http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/assessing-long-term-health-effects-from-fukushimas-radioactive-fallout/

1.This Month

How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

Nagasaki And Hiroshima (1945)

Harrowing Accounts from Hiroshima Survivors

Hiroshima Bomb to Today | Tour around the Atomic Hypocenter

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