Let’s recap one of the greatest industrial PR flops of all time: the Fukushima incident. Remarkably, no one died from the full meltdown of Unit 1, nor from the partial meltdowns of Units 2 and 3. Unit 4 was already offline for cleaning at the time, and Units 5 and 6 remained undamaged, continuing to produce electricity for three more years until public fear and pressure forced TEPCO to shut them down as well. While two unfortunate workers did die, it was due to an explosion, not radiation exposure.
In stark contrast, over 2,300 people directly died from the panicked evacuation of areas where no discernible or dangerous increase in radiation levels was found. Even today, visitors to the area are required to dress more cautiously than they would for the imaginary COVID virus. It’s also worth noting that three other nuclear power stations in the region were affected by the same tsunami that hit Fukushima, yet all successfully shut down automatically when the earthquake struck and can restart without issue.
Reports indicate that “the primary contamination spread northwest from the plant, with soil samples showing levels of caesium-137 exceeding 3 MBq/m² in some areas up to 35 km away from the reactor.” This contamination led to evacuations of approximately 15,000 residents in affected areas—scary stuff indeed.
But what does this really mean? Let’s consider bananas and Iran.
The caesium levels mentioned correspond to an exposure of only about 0.3 mSv per year. In comparison, Fukushima has a natural background radiation level of 5 mSv per year. For context, places like Ramsar in Iran experience natural background levels of 260 mSv per year. To put it another way, the “dangerous release” from Fukushima is akin to consuming ten bananas per day. A banana contains high levels of radioactive potassium, which accumulates in your muscles similarly to caesium.
This also means that the death rate from evacuations was over 15%. You had a 1-in-6 chance of being killed by being moved “for your safety,” while facing a zero percent chance of harm from radiation concerns.
Almost 20,000 people died due to the tsunami itself—a tragic natural disaster. More than 10% of those fatalities were attributed to forced, unnecessary evacuations around Fukushima.
The real issue arises when humans become involved. It’s tragic that nuclear energy has suffered such a public relations disaster that people are terrified by news reports while slicing up a radioactive banana for breakfast. Presently, about 1 trillion yen (approximately USD 7.3 billion) is being spent on cleaning up Units 1, 2, and 3—not a small sum. But why so much? All in the name of “safety.”
Lake Barrett—renowned for his role in the Three Mile Island disaster cleanup and currently employed for PR purposes by TEPCO—famously stated during an interview with Mike O’Brien on August 16, 2023: “Now, it depends on how low is low [radiation in water released from the plant]. To be drinkable, it’s going to be many decades—100 years or so. But that’s not really plausible at this stage.” The World Health Organisation’s limit for radiation in drinking water is set at 10,000 Bq per litre; TEPCO’s discharge limit is only 299 Bq/litre. Even Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials have publicly consumed this water. Why did Lake misrepresent this? Was it for his own PR benefit? His income from TEPCO ranges from USD 300k to USD 600k per year; if there’s no radiation problem, there’s no income—and therein lies part of the issue: individuals within the nuclear safety industry often amplify fear and misconceptions to maintain their livelihoods.
The Fukushima incident starkly illustrates how decades of fear-mongering against nuclear energy culminated in a human disaster rather than a technical one. This was not an unprecedented failure of technology but rather a “normal” industrial accident—one among many that occur in humanity’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and progress. The real tragedy lies not in exaggerated radiation levels but in panic-driven decisions that resulted in over 2,300 deaths from evacuation—deaths that were entirely preventable.
As we reflect on Fukushima, it is crucial to recognize that misinformation and fear often pose greater dangers than the technologies themselves. Moving forward, we must foster a more rational and informed dialogue about nuclear energy—acknowledging its potential while addressing genuine safety concerns. Only by doing so can we ensure that lessons learned from Fukushima lead us toward a more balanced understanding of risk and safety in our quest for energy solutions.
Post Piece: Strategies to Avoid Fukushima-Type Response Failures
Adopt a decentralized emergency response approach that empowers local authorities and allows for tailored, quick reactions to local conditions.
Establish reliable communication systems that provide real-time data on plant conditions and environmental monitoring to help decision-makers assess risks accurately.
Conduct frequent joint training exercises involving all stakeholders—nuclear plant operators, local emergency services, and government officials—to ensure coordinated responses.
Create flexible evacuation plans that can be adjusted based on real-time data about radiation levels and wind directions, with pre-determined safe zones that can be activated quickly.
Invest in resilient infrastructure capable of withstanding natural disasters, including backup power systems for nuclear plants that remain operational even during extensive outages.
Implement educational programs to inform the public about nuclear safety, radiation risks, and emergency procedures to reduce fear and misinformation.
Convene independent review committees after any significant incident to analyze response effectiveness and identify areas for improvement—fostering continuous learning.
By incorporating these strategies into emergency response planning, nuclear facilities—and indeed any industrial facility—can enhance their preparedness and minimise potential Fukushima-type response failures in the future. These recommendations emphasise decentralisation, communication, training, flexibility, infrastructure resilience, public education, and continuous improvement—all crucial elements in developing a comprehensive and effective emergency response framework.
Japan responded [to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake] by closing its nuclear plants – a foolish move that has required the country to spend USD 40 billion per year on liquefied natural gas plus billions more for coal, which has created huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Another USD 11 billion per year has been spent to maintain their perfectly functional-but-idle reactors.
Nuclear power has been tarred by the Fukushima Daichi disaster, but the failure was NOT the fault of nuclear power. It was caused by repeated corporate lying, record falsifying and penny-pinching, by the lack of government enforcement of seawall height, by building too low to the ocean, and by installing backup generators in easily flooded basements.
Blaming nuclear power for Fukushima is like blaming the train when an engineer derails it by taking a turn at 70 mph that is posted for 30. (The Japanese Diet has stated that the Fukushima accident was not the fault of “nuclear power.”)
Blaming nuclear power for Fukushima is like blaming the train when an engineer derails it by taking a turn at 70 mph that is posted for 30. (The Japanese Diet has stated that the Fukushima accident was not the fault of “nuclear power.”)
A few days later, Goodman’s article was read by Captain Reid Tanaka, a United States Navy professional with considerable expertise in nuclear matters who had been intimately involved during the meltdown – and Captain Tanaka presented a very different view:
“I was in Japan, in the Navy, when the tsunami struck and because of my nuclear training, I was called to assist in the reactor accident response and served as a key adviser to the US military forces commander and the US Ambassador to Japan. I spent a year in Tokyo with the US NRC-led team to assist TEPCO and the Japanese Government in battling through the casualty.
“My command (CTF 70) was the direct reporting command for the REAGAN (where we had control over REAGAN’S assignments and missions) and were in direct decision-making with REAGAN’S Commanding Officer and team. I don’t qualify to be called an “expert” in reactor accidents…, but I am well informed enough to know where my limits are and to see through much of the distortions on this issue….
“A Google search will tend to drive people to alarmist websites and non-technical news reports, but you could also find the dull, technical (yet truthful) places such as the IAEA or DOE…
“Numerous bodies of experts have weighed in and provided assessments and reports. A couple are quite critical of TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear industry and regulators.
Operation Tomodachi On Reagan
“… the biggest problem the public has is … being able to distinguish the science-based, objective reports from the alarmist and emotionally charged positions that get the attention of the press, some of whom are self- proclaimed experts in some fields but NOT nuclear power: Dr. David Suzuki and Dr. Michio Kaku. Neither understand spent fuel, nor the condition of spent fuel pools….
“Dr. Suzuki is an award-winning scientist and a champion for the environment, but he is lacking any real understanding of spent fuel or radioactivity. “Bye-bye Japan?’ A headline grabbing sound-bite, but the math just doesn’t work…
“[Sometimes] the true experts cannot give a simple answer because there isn’t one, while those who have no science to back their claims have no compunction in saying the sky is falling and everyone else is lying.
“For the Navy, the contamination caused by Fukushima created a huge amount of extra work and costs for decontaminating the ships and our aircraft to ‘zero’, but [there was] no risk to the health of our people.
“REAGAN was about 100 miles from Fukushima when the radiation alarms first alerted us to the Fukushima accident. Navy nuclear ships have low-level radiation alarms to alert us of a potential problem with our onboard reactors. So, when the airborne alarms were received, we were quite surprised and concerned. The levels of contamination were small, but they caused a great deal of additional evaluation and work. REAGAN’s movements were planned and made to avoid additional fallout. Sailors who believe they were within five miles or so, were misinformed. Japanese ships were close; the REAGAN was not….
“There are former sailors who are engaged in a class-action suit against TEPCO for radiation sickness they are suffering for the exposure they received from Operation Tomodachi. The lead plaintiffs were originally sailors from REAGAN but now have expanded to a few other sailors from other ships. Looking at the claims, I have no doubt some of the SAILORS have some ailments, but without any real supporting information (I haven’t seen ANY credible information to that end), I do not believe any of their ailments can be attributable to radiation—fear and stress related, perhaps, but not radiation directly. Radiation sickness occurs within a ‘minutes/hours’ time frame of exposure and cancer occurs in a ‘years’ time frame. These sailors were not sick in either of these windows. I believe that many of them believe it, but I also believe most are being misled.”
The closure of Japan’s nuclear plants and its increased use of imported liquefied natural gas put an end to Japan’s long-standing trade surplus. But in 2015, bowing to financial realities and because of diminishing fear, Japan restarted the second of its reactors. As of May, 2018, seven reactors had been restarted, with many scheduled to follow.
Shortly thereafter, the U. S. media and many of the “Green” organizations began to report that a Fukushima worker had been “awarded compensation and official acknowledgment that his cancer [leukemia] was caused by working in the reactor disaster zone.” That’s wrong, and competent journalists who do adequate research should know it. Here are the facts:
The worker received a workman’s comp benefit package because he satisfied the statutory criteria stipulated in the 1976 Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act, which says that workers who are injured or become ill while working or while commuting to and from work, can receive financial aid and medical coverage. The worker spent 14 months at F. Daiichi. (October, 2012 to December 2013.)
In late December 2013, the worker felt too ill to work, so he went to a doctor, and was diagnosed with acute leukaemia in January, 2014. No link was made between his occupational exposure and his cancer. In addition, because the latency period between radiation exposure and the onset of leukaemia is 5 to 7 years, the worker did not get cancer from working at Fukushima. It was, in fact, a pre-existing condition that was exploited by opponents of nuclear power who routinely repeat convenient-but-wrong stories because being honest and accurate takes time, knowledge and integrity.
In 2016, anti-nuclear zealots began to fear-monger about the effects of Cesium-134 on fish while ignoring reports from NOAA and the Japanese government that stated, “Radioactive Cesium in fish caught near Fukushima Daiichi continues to dwindle. Of the more than 70 specimens taken in October, only five showed any Caesium isotope 134, the ‘fingerprint’ for Fukushima Daiichi contamination. The highest Cs-134 concentration was [associated] with a Banded Dogfish, at 8.3 Becquerels per kilogram. Half of the sampled fish had detectable levels of Cs-137, but all were well below Japan’s limit of 100 Bq/kg….”
These amounts are tiny, and the particles emitted from the Potassium-40, which we all contain, are more potent than the Caesium-137 emissions that many greens apparently fear.
There is 500,000 times more natural radiation in the ocean than the amount added by Fukushima.
Regarding the risk from remaining reactor material that many greens agonize over, Dr. Alex Cannarasubsequently wrote,
“As of late 2013, the spent fuel at Fukushima was 30 months old. That means that the rods and the fuel pellets within them are able to be stored in air. If any rods had never been in a reactor core, they have no fission products in them and are perfectly safe to take apart by hand.
“So, what do we have at Fukushima? We have some melted core materials (corium), which can be entombed. We have water containing a small amount of fission products like Cesium. And, we have a bunch of fuel assemblies that are very radioactive because of their internal creation of fission products when they were in their reactor cores. (No fission products are created when rods are out of cores, in pools or dry air storage.)
“Since the rods are at least 30 months out of fission-product production [2013], one can see how quickly they’ve lost the need for cooling and the reduction in their radioactivity.
“Nuclear power has for its entire life, been the safest form of power generation. The EPA estimates that we lose more than 12,000 Americans every year to coal emissions. The Chinese lose 700,000, and the Indians, 100,000. To delay building nuclear power plants will cause diseases and deaths that could easily be avoided.”
Nuclear power is the safest way to generate electricity.
World Health Organisation
“A nuclear power plant that melts down is less dangerous than a fossil fuel plant that is working correctly. [Because of their toxic ashes and emissions.] Fukushima illustrates that even a meltdown that penetrates containment is very little danger to the public when a few basic precautions are taken.” Andrew Daniels, author, “After Fukushima What We Now Know”.
“Not 1 in 10,000 people have any concept of the huge amount of 24/7, low-carbon electricity a nuclear power plant can deliver compared to the intermittent dribble provided by the renewables.”
Every year, U.S., nuclear-generated electricity prevents more than 500 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering our atmosphere – Wall Street Journal
No other technology produces energy as cheaply, safely and continuously on a large scale as nuclear power. No other energy source can match nuclear power’s low environmental impact, partly because its energy density is a million times greater than that of fossil fuels – and more so for wind or solar.
As of 2016, the world’s 400 + nuclear reactors created about 15% of our electricity. France, alarmed by the cost of petro-fuels, went to 70% nuclear in just 16 years, and Finland, now at 30%, is aiming for 60%. Sweden is adding 10.
Nuclear France emits about 40 grams of CO2/kWh, but Germany, the US, Japan and most industrialised nations emit 400 – 500 grams per kiloWatt hour – ten times more per kWh than heavily nuclear France. Compared to fossil fuel-reliant wind and solar farms, nuclear power is a gift from the energy gods.
Nuclear power, being CO2-free, is by far the most effective displacer of greenhouse gases, so how can my fellow “greens,” oppose nuclear power when the environmental costs of burning carbon-based fuels are so high?
Dr. James Lovelock, a patriarch of the environmental movement, has begged people to support nuclear energy: “Civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear power, the one safe, available, energy source now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by an outraged planet.”
“In the core of just one reactor, the power density is about 338 million watts per square meter. To equal that with wind energy, which has a power density of 1 watt per square meter, you’d need about 772 square miles of wind turbines….
“Some opponents still claim that nuclear energy is too dangerous. Debunking that argument requires only a close look at the facts about Fukushima….
“Here’s the reality: The tsunami caused two deaths – two workers who drowned at the plant.
“It was feared that radiation from the plant would contaminate large areas of Japan and even reach the U.S. That didn’t happen. In 2013, the World Health Organization concluded: ‘Outside of the geographical areas most affected by radiation, even within Fukushima prefecture, the predicted risks remain low and no observable increases in cancer above natural variation in baseline rates are anticipated.
“High on my list of well intentioned dupes are those who praise science and are eager to confront Climate Change but refuse to accept nuclear power as an essential part of carbon-reduction strategies. They dismiss new reactor designs that they don’t understand, and then talk about how wind and solar power can ‘supply our needs.’
“They are wrong, but nuclear can supply our needs when people conquer their fears, educate themselves on the safety of nuclear power – and constructively join the fray. Until they do, they must accept their culpability in creating an overheated planet with millions of climate refugees.”
Only at the “illegal” plant at Chernobyl, which was designed to also make plutonium for bombs, with electricity being a by-product, has anyone died from radiation from nuclear power, but we’ve had tens of millions of coal, gas and petroleum-related, early deaths. Furthermore, our reactors, by generating electricity from the 20,000 Russian warheads we purchased in the Megatons to Megawatts program, have become the ultimate in weapons-reduction techniques.
What about 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima? We’ll examine each of them, but it is important to remember that nuclear plants have been supplying 15% of the world’s electricity, while creating no CO2, for 16,000 reactor-years of almost accident-free operation. And the reactors that have powered our nuclear Navy for more than 50 years have similar safety records. (Naval reactor fuel can be up to 90% U-235.)
In March, 1979, two weeks after the release of the popular movie, The China Syndrome, a partial meltdown of a reactor core due to a stuck coolant valve and design flaws that confused the operators, caused mildly radioactive gases to accumulate inside one of the reactor buildings.
After the gases were treated with charcoal, they were vented, and a small amount of contaminated water was released into the Susquehanna River. No one died or was harmed.
However, when an AP reporter described a “bubble” of hydrogen inside the reactor building in a way that led people to think that the plant was a “hydrogen bomb,” many residents fled, which caused more harm than the accident.
In fact, radiation exposure from Three Mile Island was far less than the amount of radiation that pilots and airline passengers receive during a round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles [1 mrem, or 1 microSivert – 100 times less than average yearly background exposure in the area around Three Mile Island]. Furthermore, in the following decades, more than a dozen studies have found no short or long-term ill effects for anyone, whether they were downwind or downstream from the plant or at it – and since then, operator training and safety measures have greatly improved.
President Carter—who had specialized in nuclear power while in the United States Navy—told his cabinet after visiting the plant that the [Three Mile Island] accident was minor, but reportedly declined to do so in public in order to avoid offending Democrats who opposed nuclear power.
Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program [55 years safe operation], so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
Despite all of the fear and panic, nothing happened. No one died, and no one got cancer, but the media-hyped event at Three Mile Island came very close to shutting down all progress in American nuclear power. Because of the radiophobia generated by our sensation-seeking press and fervent greens, neither of whom bothered to check the facts, many proposed reactors were replaced by coal plants, and in the following decades, pollution from those plants brought premature death to at least 500,000 Americans.
In 1986, during a test ordered by Moscow that involved disabling the safety systems, a portion of the core of the reactor, which had design hazards not present in Western reactors, was inadvertently exposed. (The RKMB reactor at Chernobyl was long judged to be dangerous by scientists outside of the Soviet Union.)
As Dr. Spencer Weart wrote in The Rise of Nuclear Fear, “In short, for Soviet reactor designers, safety was less important than building ‘civilian’ reactors that could produce military plutonium if desired, and building them cheaply.”
This negligence led to a steam/hydrogen explosion that released radioactive gases into the atmosphere because the reactor had no effective containment structure. In contrast, no U.S. reactor contains flammables. Each has a reinforced concrete containment structure that can survive an airliner hit, and every plant is strictly regulated by the NRC.
There has never been a source of energy as safe or kind to the environment as nuclear power, and the reason for the safety is regulation.
Every responsible nation similarly regulates its nuclear power plants and shares information and training practices via international agencies. This cooperation, which was expanded after Three Mile Island, resulted in so many improvements that civilian nuclear power climbed from 60% up-time in the sixties to at least 90% today.
For three days, Soviet authorities hid the [Chernobyl] disaster and delayed evacuating the area, coming clean when radiation readings across Europe began to rise. (The government also failed to distribute iodine tablets, which could have protected thousands from airborne Iodine-131, which is readily absorbed by the thyroid, particularly in the young. (A body with an abundance of benign I-127 is less likely to absorb I-131.)
Chernobyl failed due to bad design, Moscow’s interference, poor training and a system that forbade operators from sharing essential information about reactor problems. It is the only “civilian” reactor accident where radiation directly killed anyone. Initially, approximately eighteen firefighters died from intense radiation. Yet, with design changes and proper procedures, several similar reactors still operate in the former Soviet Union.
Metsamor, a nuclear power plant in Armenia, (former USSR), also has no containment structure. The European Union has urged Armenia to close down the site for years, and offered $289 million to finance shutting down the plant…
(A round trip flight for the U. S. to Chernobyl will expose travellers to twice as much additional background radiation as their 2-day tour in the exclusion zone, which even includes a tour of the damaged plant).
Furthermore, the deformed and brain-damaged “Chernobyl children” that sensation-seeking TV programs occasionally feature are no different from similarly afflicted children elsewhere in Europe who received no fallout, but that information is never provided by anti-nuclear activists and the media. (Since Chernobyl, cancer rates in the Ukraine have been about 2/3 of the rate in Australia.)
Because of the erroneous, dangerous LNT theory and many dire predictions from people like Helen Caldicott (coming up in future episodes), many thousands of badly frightened European women endured needless abortions because they had become convinced that they were carrying monster babies.
Tepco’s Fukushima reactors began operation in 1971 and ran safely for 40 years, generating huge amounts of electricity without creating any CO2 or air pollution, but then, in 2011, came a record-setting earthquake – Tōhoku.
However, the quake destroyed the plant’s connections to the electrical grid, which required emergency generators to power the systems that cooled the still-hot reactors.
Although three of Tepco’s six nuclear reactors were off-line when the quake struck, five were eventually doomed because: 1. In 1967, Tepco removed 25 meters from the site’s 35-meter seawall to ease bringing equipment ashore. 2. Tepco replaced the original seawall with only a six-meter seawall. 3. The Japanese government advised Tepco to raise it, but Tepco declined – and the government did nothing. 4. Tepco had inexplicably placed five of its six emergency generators in the basements. 5. The tsunami flooded all but #6. 6. Batteries powered the controls for about 8 hours, and then failed. Without coolant, meltdown was assured.
Reactors 1 – 4 are useless, and number 5 is damaged, but reactor 6 was unaffected because its back-up equipment was intelligently sited well above the tsunami’s reach. Reactor 6 is capable of producing power, but it has not been started, largely because of the anti-nuclear hysteria fanned by most of the Japanese press.
There were warnings: All along the coast, ancient “Sendai stones” have been warning residents to avoid building below 150 feet above sea level for centuries.
The Onagawa nuclear plant, which was closer to the epicenter of the quake, also survived the quake, and its 45-foot high seawall easily blocked the tsunami. The tsunami took more than 15,000 lives, but Fukushima’s seawall failure took the lives of just two workers who drowned.
LNT [Linear No Threshold Theory] was pushed through the U.N. by Russia and China in the 1950’s to stop America’s above-ground weapons testing. It worked, but it also caused a worldwide fear of radiation below levels that are dangerous.. The radiation safety people liked it because it seemed so… conservative. But it has become an ideology “ruled by hysteria and fuelled by ignorance.” Dr. Kathy Reichs, Society for the Advancement of Education.
Dr. Tim Maloney: “Anyone living permanently in the green zone would only receive a dose rate equal to twice the rate in Colorado, where the cancer rate is less than the US average. The dose rate in the dark red regions is 1/3 of the safety threshold set by the International Commission on System of Radiological Protection in 1934. Even by today’s extreme standards, this level of exposure carries no known cancer risk.
“Anxious to impress, officials and reporters donned white suits and masks, which made good TV but did nothing for the child who saw the school playground being dug up by workers who were afraid of an unseen evil called radiation. Unfortunately, most people see their fears confirmed as fact when workers and officials dress this way. An open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a firm hand shake and a cup of tea would be a better way to reassure.”
A man uses a roller near a Geiger counter, measuring a radiation level of 0.207 microsieverts per hour, during nuclear radiation decontamination work at a park in Koriyama. Photograph: Toru Hanai/Reuters
Imagine the anxiety created by clueless officials who provided useless information, as when a school official warned parents that the radiation intensity was 0.14 micro Sieverts per hour, which was meaningless because the normal radiation level in some Japanese cities can be five times that high.
Officials in protective gear check for signs of radiation on children who are from the evacuation area near the Fukushima nuclear plant on March 13, 2011, two days after the accident began. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Fukushima Fear of Radiation Killed People
In 2012, UNSCEAR stated, “…no clinically observable effects have been reported and there is no evidence of acute radiation injury in any of the 20,115 workers who participated in Tepco’s efforts to mitigate the accident at the plant.”
A year later, UNSCEAR added: “Radiation exposure following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely [that there will be] any health effects among the general public and the vast majority of workers.”
And in an April, 2014 follow-up, UNSCEAR reported that, “Overall, people in Fukushima are expected on average to receive less than 10 mSv due to the accident over their whole lifetime, compared with the 170 mSv lifetime dose from natural background radiation that most people in Japan typically receive.”
Finally, in October, 2015, UNSCEAR confirmed that none of the new information accumulated after the 2013 report “materially affected the main findings in, or challenged the major assumptions of, the 2013 report.” However, despite these positive reports, as of November, 2016, most of the 150,000 people who were forced to evacuate still lived in temporary housing.
Dr. Jane Orient, who practices internal medicine agreed: “The number of radiation casualties from the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors stands at zero. In Fukushima Prefecture, the casualties from radiation terror number more than 1,600… The U.S. is vulnerable to the same radiation terror as occurred in Japan because of using the wrong dose-response model, which is based on the linear no- threshold hypothesis (LNT), for assessing radiation health risks.”
The number of radiation casualties from the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors stands at zero.
“The BABYSCAN, a whole-body counter (WBC) for small children, was developed in 2013, and units have been installed at three hospitals in Fukushima Prefecture. Between December, 2013 and March, 2015, 2702 children between the ages of 0 and 11 have been scanned, and none had a detectable level of cesium-137.” (The anti-nuclear crowd had been obsessing about exposure to cesium-137.)
Positive reports like this rarely appear in our American press, which frustrates professionals like Leslie Corrice, a former nuclear power plant operator, environmental monitoring technician, health physics design engineer, public education coordinator and emergency planner who writes the informative and highly respected blog, The Hiroshima Syndrome.
“As long as the LNT theory is maintained, our fear of radiation will continue to damage the psyche of all humanity, restrict the therapeutic and healing effects of non-lethal doses of radiation, limit the growth of green nuclear energy, and needlessly prolong the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity.
“In 1987, when I was frustrated because it seemed like the major news outlets bent over backwards to broadcast negative nuclear reports while seemingly ignoring anything positive, a former Press manager with a major news outlet in Cleveland took me aside and gave me the facts of life.
“He first explained that the Press is a moneymaking venture. The ratings determine advertising income; the lifeblood of the business – and the surefire money-makers were war, presidential elections, natural disasters and airline crashes.
…the surefire money-makers were war, presidential elections, natural disasters and airline crashes.
Cleveland press manager
“Turning to Three Mile Island, he said the ratings sky-rocketed and stayed that way for the better part of two weeks. In the years that followed, the media found that negative reports caused an increase in ratings, and positive stuff didn’t. This trend slowly dwindled, but Chernobyl re-ignited the ratings impact of nuclear accident reporting and proved that broadcasting the negative was better for business…
“He added that the media might someday entirely ignore the positive and only report the negative in regard to nuclear energy, and he speculated that all it would take was one more accident. Unfortunately, he was right. Fukushima has pushed the world’s Press into the journalistic dark side. My Fukushima Updates blog has lashed the Japanese Press and the world’s news media outside Japan severely for primarily reporting the negative…. A recent example concerns the child care thyroid study in Fukushima Prefecture during the past four years.
“On October 5, 2015, four PhDs in Japan alleged in the Tsuda Report that the Fukushima accident had spawned a thyroid cancer epidemic among the prefecture’s children, which contradicted the Fukushima Univ. Medical School, Japanese Research Center for Cancer Prevention and Screening, and National Cancer Center, which all found that the detected child thyroid precancerous anomalies in Fukushima Prefecture cannot be realistically linked to the accident. Regardless, the Tsuda Report’s claim made major headlines in Japan, then spread to mainstream outlets outside Japan, including UPI and AP.
“Here’s the problem. In December 2013, a scientific report was published on a comparison of the rate of child thyroid, pre-cancerous anomalies in Fukushima Prefecture with the rates in three prefectures hundreds of kilometers distant: Aomori, Yamanashi and Nagasaki.
“The Fukushima University medical team studying the issue had discovered that there was no prior data on child thyroid cancer rates in Japan, so there was nothing to compare the 2012 results to.
“Because of the furor caused by the original release of their findings in 2012, the team decided to take matters into their own hands and offer free testing to volunteer families in the distant prefectures. Nearly 5,000 parents took advantage of the opportunity and had their children screened.
“What was found was completely unexpected. The abnormality rates in Aomori, Yamanashi and Nagasaki Prefectures were actually higher than that discovered in Fukushima Prefecture, which conclusively indicated that the radiation from the Fukushima accident had no negative impact on the health of the thyroid glands in Fukushima’s children. Just one Japanese Press outlet mentioned the 2013 discovery at the very end of an article about a few more children being found to have the anomalies in Fukushima….
…no negative impact on the health of the thyroid glands in Fukushima’s children.
Fukushima University
“On the other hand, when a maverick team of four Japanese with PhDs publish a highly questionable report – full of so many holes that it should be tossed into the trash – alleging a severe cancer problem caused by the Fukushima accident, it gets major coverage inside Japan and significant coverage by the world’s mainstream press!
“It is important to emphasize that the Tsuda Report fails to acknowledge the fact that Prefectures unaffected by the Fukushima accident had the higher anomaly rates. (Which is why the Tsuda Report is worthy of the trash heap.)
“The media might not make money off sharing the good news about Fukushima, but they are committing a moral crime against humanity by not doing it.”
Excerpts from the Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 7- 31 May, 2013 General Assembly Records.
Chapter III Scientific findings [Fukushima]
“1. The accident and the release of radioactive material into the environment.
On 11 March 2011, at 14:46 [2:46 pm] local time, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake occurred near Honshu, Japan, creating a devastating tsunami that left a trail of death and destruction in its wake.
The earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which flooded over 500 square kilometres of land, resulted in the loss of more than 20,000 lives.
The loss of off-site and on-site electrical power and compromised safety systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station led to severe core damage to three of the six nuclear reactors on the site.
In this March 11, 2011 photo taken about 2 hours after a massive earthquake and tsunami occurred, Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Okumamachi, is pictured. (AP Photo/Yomiuri Shimbun, Yasushi Kanno) JAPAN
The Government of Japan recommended the evacuation of about 78,000 people living within a 20-km (12 mile) radius of the power plant and the sheltering in their own homes of about 62,000 other people living between 20 and 30 km from the plant. However, the evacuations themselves also had repercussions for the people involved, including a number of evacuation-related deaths and the subsequent impact on mental and social well-being
Those “evacuation-related deaths” would eventually total 1,600, with 90% of them caused by Japan’s reliance on American radiation safety standards that are based on a fraud that began in the 1920’s. More on that in coming episodes.
That fraud, committed by a Nobel laureate and formalised by the U.S. in the 1950’s, became regulatory dogma that has greatly retarded the expansion of CO2-free nuclear power, accelerated Climate Change and caused the deaths of millions who, out of fear of radiation, avoided essential diagnostic methods and treatments, and at Fukushima caused hundreds of suicides by distraught and unstable people, primarily the elderly, who feared that they would never see their homes or businesses again.
The linear model has since been dropped by a number of international bodies specialising in radiation protection.
The daughter of an elderly woman who had hung herself lamented, “If she had not been forced to evacuate, she wouldn’t have killed herself.” (Chapter 7 of the book compares the deaths caused by using fossil fuels instead of emission-free nuclear power).
Children were not allowed to play outside, and topsoil was needlessly removed at great expense from farm fields that became, as a consequence, less fertile.
Hundreds of elderly people were hastily removed from nursing homes and hospitals, only to be scattered across the hardwood floors of gymnasiums, where many died from makeshift medical care, or sometimes none at all.
These deaths were preventable, just as Climate Change can be moderated if the industrialised nations replace the burning of carbon and the use of deadly, inefficient, carbon-reliant windmills and solar farms (chapters 9 and 10) with CO2-free nuclear power as rapidly as possible while developing technologies that support natural processes that can remove CO2 from our atmosphere. Windmills can’t do it. Neither can solar, not singly or combined with wind. For that, we will need an abundance of safe, efficient, CO2-free nuclear power. Nothing else will do.
Here is a podcast with George Erickson talking about Fukushima Daiichi:
