There is simply no comparison in the damage between Fukushima and Tohoku. And yet the follow-on coverage of the nuclear ‘disaster’ has greatly eclipsed attention to the much bigger disaster that befell Japan that terrible day. Why? And more importantly, at what cost? the psychology of risk perception offers some intriguing answers.
The correct, but rarely seen answer is five: one man who became trapped in the console of a crane during the earthquake, two who were swept away by the tsunami and a clean up worker who suffered from a heart attack. Another man reportedly died suddenly in October. Although the company is not revealing the cause of death, they say it was not related to radiation. The entire toll from the earthquake and tsunami, remember, is estimated to be in the region of 20,000.
While it is not yet over, and radioactivity continues to come out of the devastated plant, the good news is that there are still precisely zero deaths attributable to the release of radiation at the plant, and on the basis of doses received, zero are expected.
Using cancer registration data for Great Britain for the period of 1969 to 1993, COMARE found no increase of childhood leukemia in areas exposed to slightly higher levels of radionuclides from nearby plants: there were only 20 cases of the blood cancer within 3.1 miles of nuclear power stations in 35 years and 430 cases within 15.5 miles. Those figures were similar to the numbers of leukemia cases in sites that had been considered for nuclear power plants, but where construction was never completed. COMARE is independently-funded and, according to its website, “members have never been drawn from the Nuclear or Electrical Power Supply Industries.”
The full report can be dowloaded here.