Just how dangerous is the Fukushima nuclear power plant? Three years ago, on March 11, 2011, Fukushima in Japan was hit by an earthquake and tsunami that led to a meltdown at the nuclear power plant.
Today, it is still not clear just what danger the leaking nuclear power plant poses.
If Steven Ross Pomeroy, writing for Forbes, is to be believed, the radiation risks to the surrounding population are “surprisingly slight,” in a story entitled, “Smoking is more dangerous than Fukushima radiation.
As he writes, a new study from a massive team of Japanese researchers shows that for people living more than twenty kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi, the elevated cancer risk is low. Their results are published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.
In the immediate wake of the meltdown, and in many stories published in the media since, the threats posed have been depicted as running the full spectrum – from minimal to cataclysmic.
Just recently, stories have come out that report radiation from Fukushima has turned up on the West Coast of North America, though whether the level is harmful is unclear.
Part of the problem has been that the Japanese government has been keen to minimize the bad press about the plant, even to the point where it introduced a new secrecy law in December that could make it difficult for people to speak out about any dangers posed by the plant.
In the following video, PBS reporter Miles O’Brien is given the opportunity to film in the damaged plant and interview officials of Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) involved in the clean-up.
The video should be watched carefully. The potential danger posed by a meltdown in Building 4 is not addressed, the status of the three wrecked and highly radioactive buildings is not adequately addressed, and one of the people interviewed is Lake Barrett, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official who was reportedly integral to the cover-up at Three Mile Island, where owners falsely denied for years that any fuel had melted. Barrett casually suggests tritium-laden water can be dumped in the ocean.
Clearly, the full story – and the potential danger, particularly for people in Japan – is not being told.
