Why Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl

To summarize a few key points:

  • The radiation risk model used by the ICRP is too simple. It treats internal (that is inhaled or ingested) radiation emitters the same as external radiation emitters. Busby is convinced that internal radiation exposure can be “up to 1,000 times more harmful than the ICRP model.”
  • Using the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) Busby calculates approximately 200,000 excess cancers within the next 50 years. Half will be diagnosed within 10 years. The ICRP model predicts 2,838 excess cancers. “The eventual yield will therefore be another test of the two risk models,”
  • Many studies done after Chernobyl showed much greater cancer rates than the ICRP model predicted.
  • “There will follow increased rates of ill health, including cancer and birth defects, which will be proportional to the overall air concentration. High in Japan, low in USA, and very low in Europe….”
  • “I believe that in the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, huge amounts of spent fuel were blown sky high. The ground contamination out to 100 km at Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl, the dose rates higher. And Fukushima has contaminated Tokyo with 35 million people. The population of the 200 km radius is also enormous, about 10 million. Most of the Chernobyl stuff fell away from big population centers. Luckily it went north and west and not to Kiev which is south. Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan. Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse.”

Chris Busby was interviewed by Norimatsu Satoko and Narusawa Muneo for the Asia-Pacific Journal.  He is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), Visiting Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, and Guest Researcher at the Federal Institute for Crop and Soil Research, Julius Kuehn Institute, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants in Braunschweig, Germany.

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