News reporting on the unfolding nuclear situation in Japan keeps running up against missing and contradictory information. Is the Japanese government being less than candid about the dangers?
That question came up today when I was interviewed by Alex Witt on “Saturday Morning MSNBC,” and it’s a legitimate question. Why are we hearing things so differently from Japan and from experts in the US including the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who advised a precautionary evacuation out to 50 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant?
The first source of confusion is the actual state of knowledge around the plant. Loss of on-site power means a lot of instrumentation in the damaged plants is knocked out. Most of what authorities are saying about radiation and the condition of the reactors comes from external monitors and dosimeters carried by plant and emergency workers.
That means experts are imputing the plant conditions from external observations and measurements. There’s no way to have someone stroll around these plants and tote up the damage – that would likely be a suicide mission.
But it’s from these indirect readings that plant and government officials have to take their best guess about what the danger to the public really is, and what it could become. And experts can legitimately disagree on those guesses.
The Japanese government has ordered evacuation of residents up to 12 miles away, and urged those 12-20 miles away to stay indoors to avoid any radiation passing overhead. Officials say this strategy will protect them should fallout be blown inland. But NRC experts say they’d order evacuations out to 50 miles from the plant (even though NRC rules only provide for evacuation to 10 miles in a US emergency). That has caused a lot of controversy – is Japan protecting its citizens?
Perhaps if there had been no earthquake or tsunami, Japan might have made the choice to evacuate further than 12 miles, just as a precaution. But there was an earthquake, and a tsunami. Somewhere between a quarter and a half a million Japanese are homeless, and many shelters are struggling with inadequate heat, water, food and sanitation. Would Japan really be prudent to send citizens lucky enough to still have homes into those shelters? Or would trying to avoid the least smidgen of nuclear risk actually expose the people to the very real risks of shelter privations?
And we are talking about low radiological risks – radiation experts say the expected health effects beyond 12 miles are diminishingly small. We are not talking about deaths or even radiation sickness – those are risks close to the plant, for workers and emergency personnel. For the general public, at a distance of 12 miles or more, we’re talking about the possibility of fractional increases in the lifetime cancer risks of exposed individuals, cancers that won’t show up for 20 to 30 years, if ever.
The Japanese government is balancing immediate critical needs for food and shelter for hundreds of thousands of people in the quake zone with worries about possible risks should the wind change direction and a radioactive plume be carried inland.
That’s the kind of decision no one ever wants to have to make. There’s simply no evidence Japanese officials are making it cavalierly