Japan’s Fukishima fallout is serious, but it’s not Chernobyl

When Japanese officials Tuesday raised their assessment of the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant to the highest rating on the international scale, they put it nominally on par with the meltdown at Chernobyl 25 years ago.

But Fukushima isn’t Chernobyl. At least not yet.

I have the little-sought-after distinction of having been to both places. The situation in Fukushima is dire – and terrifying for those who live in the region – but we’re not yet at the stage where an entire region of Japan needs to be written off for decades or centuries to come, as with Pripyat, the city closest to the Chernobyl reactor in what is now northern Ukraine. Pripyat remains a ghost town, with “April 26, 1986” still written on classroom chalkboards and the envelopes left in people’s mailboxes. After being left to stare at the sky in confusion for several hours after the nuclear disaster that day, the 47,000 residents of Pripyat were hastily ordered out of the city and never allowed to return.

The tens of thousands of Japanese who were evacuated from the 20-kilometre zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi into makeshift shelters are temporarily sharing that fate – video taken inside the exclusion zone shows cows and dogs wandering abandoned and earthquake-damaged streets – but for Fukushima to truly move alongside Chernobyl on the scale of nuclear disasters, the situation would have to continue to deteriorate for some time to come.

While Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, which that operates Fukushima Dai-ichi warned yesterday that because the plant was still leaking, the radiation emitted could eventually exceed that released by Chernobyl. But that seems to be a worst-case scenario. Chernobyl was an off-the-charts event, an eight or nine on the scale of one to seven.

The amount of radiation released since the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is still only about 10 per cent of that spewed into the air when Chernobyl Reactor No. 1 exploded. The key difference between the two disasters remains that the four troubled nuclear reactors at Fukushima shut down as they were supposed to on March 11, while Chernobyl exploded while the reactor was still running, causing a catastrophic chain reaction that shot radiation into the upper atmosphere.

“Chernobyl exploded while the reactors were still active, which is completely different from the situation at Fukushima,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the Japanese government body that Tuesday raised the severity of the Fukushima disaster to a seven out of seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale. He added that the decision to raise Fukushima’s status to a level seven disaster was based on new data about the radiation released following in the first days following the earthquake and tsunami, rather than any new events.

Nuclear incidents classified as level seven involve a major release of radiation with widespread health and environmental effects, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Chernobyl also had no containment building, allowing radioactive contamination to spread as far as 500 kilometres away. And while radiation has escaped the containment facilities at Fukushima Dai-ichi, steel-and-concrete structures have remained largely intact, minimizing the impact beyond the immediate exclusion zone. Radiation levels – and anxiety – have ticked up in Tokyo, 250 kilometres to the south, but readings generally remained below natural background radiation in Hong Kong, and only barely above that found in big cities such as London or New York.

Source: The Globe and Mail