Twenty-eight of the firemen and emergency clean-up workers died in the first three months after the explosion from acute radiation sickness and one died of cardiac arrest. Bungling, yes. Disorganised, incoherent and sometimes contradictory, yes. But it is difficult to accuse Japanese officials or TEPCO of intentionally covering up information, with round-the-clock updates and a steady stream of data.
Chernobyl was initially covered up by the secretive Soviet state, which remained silent for two days. But authorities, obliged by huge radiation releases throughout Europe, gradually disclosed details of the accident, showing unprecedented Soviet-era openness.
One month since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, workers still have to inject water into the reactors, creating more contaminated water that is hampering the restoration of power to pumps to cool the reactors and bring them to a cold shutdown.
However, Japan's aggressive disaster response, which relocated , people from their homes near Fukushima, is thought to have indirectly caused around 1, deaths, most of which were people age 66 years or more, the World Nuclear Association reported.
Japanese authorities created a no-go zone around Fukushima that extended for 12 miles 20 kilometers ; the damaged reactors were permanently closed, while cleanup efforts continued. The extent of Fukushima's environmental impact is still unknown, though there is already some evidence that genetic mutations are on the rise in butterflies from the Fukushima area, producing deformations in their wings, legs and eyes.
Radiation from contaminated water that escaped Fukushima reached North America's western coast in , but experts said that contamination was too low to pose a threat to human health.
And in , researchers reported that wines produced in California after the Fukushima accident had elevated levels of radioactive cesium, but the California Department of Public Health declared that the wines were not dangerous to consume.
Chernobyl's exclusion zone encompassed an area 18 miles 30 km around the ruins of the plant, and the towns within its boundaries remain abandoned to this day.
Trees in nearby forests turned red and died soon after the explosion. But decades later, diverse wildlife communities appear to be thriving in the zone, in the absence of human inhabitants. A spokesman for Nisa said the new ranking did not mean the Japanese plant posed the same threat to public health or involved similarly big releases of radiation as the Chernobyl disaster.
At Chernobyl, explosions destroyed a reactor, releasing a cloud of radiation that contaminated large areas of Europe. At Fukushima, which was damaged by an earthquake, the reactors still have mostly intact containment vessels surrounding their nuclear cores. Japanese officials point out that at Chernobyl, the reactor itself exploded while still active. At Fukushima, the magnitude nine earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant's cooling system , leading to a partial meltdown of the reactor.
Earlier attempts to cool the reactor by hosing water from fire engines and helicopters left pools of contaminated water and flooded basements, hampering the containment operation and efforts to restart the cooling pumps. To make room for more highly radioactive liquid, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric pumped tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific but stopped after the move was criticised by South Korea.
Tokyo Electric appears to be no closer to restoring cooling systems at the reactors, critical to lowering the temperature of overheated nuclear fuel rods. Japan's nuclear safety commission has estimated that the Fukushima plant's reactors had released up to 10, terabecquerels of radioactive iodine per hour into the air for several hours after they were damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. The biggest threat is fire which, particularly in Ukraine, has been a big problem in recent years.
Most fires are due to human activity. RG: What parallels do you see in the growth of wildlife in Chernobyl and Fukushima? JS: Similar things have been seen at Fukushima, though there is no top predator in Japan such as the wolf. So, large wild boar populations have been a problem. JS: Proponents of nuclear power will point to the low expected direct health effects of the Fukushima accident and to reports of now abundant wildlife in the abandoned areas.
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