Japan's Radiation Levels Are Safe? They're Lying To Us & Here Is Proof.

March 28, 2011

Some May be More Dangerous Than Radiation

Deconstructing Nuclear Experts

By CHRIS BUSBY

Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will know what I mean.” You can see this interview on youtube and decide for yourself.

What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.

I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield.  That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.

So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap.  And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes:

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.

Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there.

And Chernobyl:

The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan).

 This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009). Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl.

I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the west which falsify Wade Allison’s assertions. The first is a study of cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every 100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International Atomic Energy Agency  (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6 countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany, Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb. Yet the “doses” were very small, much lower than “natural background”. I published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000 and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on this committee representing BNFL and he introduced  himself to me as “BNFL’s Rottweiler”. No difference there.

Wade then turns to a comparison of contamination:

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl

But the IAEA themselves, not known for their independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above. This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000 disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater.

Now I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese government are apparently making a mistake in telling people not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the public which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots from the hip:

Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.

 But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used. You can see this interview on the internet, on www.vimeo.com.

Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on “absorbed dose”. This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a singly internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv.  That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells.

And what of the UN and their bonkers statement about the effects of the Chernobyl accident referred to by Wade Allison?  What you have to know, is that the UN organisations on radiation and health are compromised in favour of the nuclear military complex, which was busy testing hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere at the time of the agreement and releasing all the Strontium, Caesium, Uranium and plutonium and other stuff that was to become the cause of the current and increasing cancer epidemic. The last thing they wanted was the doctors and epidemiologists stopping their fun. The IAEA and the World Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement in 1959 to remove all research into the issue from the doctors of the WHO, to the atom scientists, the physicists of the IAEA: this agreement is still in force. The UN organisations do not refer to, or cite any scientific study, which shows their statements on Chernobyl to be false. There is a huge gap between the picture painted by the UN, the IAEA, the ICRP and the real world. And the real world is increasingly being studied and reports are being published in the scientific literature: but none of the authorities responsible for looking after the public take any notice of this evidence.

As they say on the Underground trains in London: Mind the Gap. Wade Allison and the other experts I refer to need to do just this for their own sake. The one place that this gap is being closed rapidly and savagely is in the courts. I have acted as an expert witness in over 40 cases involving radiation and health. These include cases where Nuclear Test veterans are suing the UK government for exposures at the test sites that have caused cancer, they include cases involving nuclear pollution, work exposures and exposures to depleted uranium weapons fallout. And these cases are all being won. All of them. Because in court with a judge and a jury, people like Wade Allison and George Monbiot would not last 2 minutes. 

Because in court you rely on evidence. Not bullshitting.

Joseph Conrad wrote: "after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of facts remain". I believe that these phoney experts like Wade Allison and George Monbiot are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths. I would hope that some time in the future, I can be involved as an expert in another legal case, one where Wade Allison, or George or my favourite baddy, Richard Wakeford (who actually knows better) are accused in a court of law of scientific dishonesty leading to the cancer in some poor victim who followed their advice.  When they are found guilty, I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs that their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air.

In the meantime, I challenge each of them to debate this issue with me in public on television face to face, so that the people can figure out who is right. For the late Professor John Gofman, a senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was happening and resigned, famously said:  "the nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity." This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere in the 60s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima, accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to the human race.

There is a gap between them and us. Between the phoney scientists and the public who don’t believe what they say. Between those who are employed and paid to protect us from radioactive pollution and those who die from its consequences.  Between those who talk down what is arguably the greatest public health scandal in human history, and the facts that they ignore.

Mind the Gap indeed.

Chris Busby is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. He is visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and also Guest Researcher at the Julius Kuehn Institute of the German Federal Agricultural Institute in Braunschweig, Germany. He was a member of the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk on Internal Emitters CERRIE and the UK MoD Depleted Uranium Oversight Board. He was Science and Policy Interface leader of the Policy Information network on Child Health and Environment based in the Netherlands. He was Science and Technology Speaker for the Green Party of England and Wales. He has conducted fundamental research on the health effects of internal radiation both at the theoretical and epidemiological level, including recently on the genotoxic effects of the element uranium.

CNN—June 8, 2011

Dr Helen Caldicott  click on name to learn more about 

***Here is the article that Chris Busby is referring to:  
 I think it should be titled:
Downplaying a Massive F***king Disaster


Q&A: Health effects of radiation exposure
By Richard Warry BBC News                                    March 30, 2011

Concern remains over the potential effect on human health from radiation leaks at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

A 20km (12 mile) evacuation zone affecting about 70,000 people has been imposed around the plant.
Residents living within 30km (18 miles) have been advised to leave the area, or to stay indoors, and try to make their homes airtight.

Experts believe that swift action of this sort should have minimised the risk to human health, but are worries about the level of radiation to which emergency workers have been exposed, and about possible contamination of food and water supplies.

What are the immediate health effects of exposure to radiation?

Exposure to moderate levels of radiation - above one gray (the standard measure of absorbed radiation) - can result in radiation sickness, which produces a range of symptoms.

Nausea and vomiting often begin within hours of exposure, followed by diarrhoea, headaches and fever.
After the first round of symptoms, there may be a brief period with no apparent illness, but this may be followed within weeks by new, more serious symptoms.

At higher levels of radiation, all of these symptoms may be immediately apparent, along with widespread - and potentially fatal - damage to internal organs.

Exposure to a radiation dose of four gray will typically kill about half of all healthy adults.

For comparison, radiation therapy for cancer typically involves several doses of between one and seven gray at a time - but these doses are highly controlled, and usually specifically targeted at small areas of the body.

A sievert is essentially equivalent to a gray, but tends to be used to measure lower levels of radiation, and for assessing long-term risk, rather than the short-term acute impact of exposure. There are 1,000 millisieverts in a sievert.

Q&A: Health effects of radiation

Danger level	Radiation dose	Effect
Source: World Nuclear Association
	2 millisieverts per year (mSv/yr)	Typical background radiation experienced by everyone (average 1.5 mSv in Australia, 3 mSv in North America)
	9 mSv/yr	Exposure by airline crew flying New York-Tokyo polar route
	20 mSv/yr	Current limit (averaged) for nuclear industry employees
	50 mSv/yr	Former routine limit for nuclear industry employees. It is also the dose rate which arises from natural background levels in several places in Iran, India and Europe
	100 mSv/yr	Lowest level at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident.
	350 mSv/lifetime	Criterion for relocating people after Chernobyl accident
	400 mSv/hr	The level recorded at the Japanese nuclear site, 15 March
	1,000 mSv single dose	Causes (temporary) radiation sickness such as nausea and decreased white blood cell count, but not death. Above this, severity of illness increases with dose
	5,000 mSv single dose	Would kill about half those receiving it within a month

How is radiation sickness treated?

The first thing to do is to try to minimise further contamination by removing clothes and shoes, and gently washing the skin with soap and water.

Drugs are available that increase white blood-cell production to counter any damage that may have occurred to the bone marrow, and to reduce the risk of further infections due to immune-system damage.

There are also specific drugs that can help to reduce the damage to internal organs caused by radioactive particles.

How does radiation have an impact on health?

Radioactive materials that decay spontaneously produce ionising radiation, which has the capacity to cause significant damage to the body's internal chemistry, breaking the chemical bonds between the atoms and molecules that make up our tissues.

The body responds by trying to repair this damage, but sometimes it is too severe or widespread to make repair possible. There is also a danger of mistakes in the natural repair process.

Regions of the body that are most vulnerable to radiation damage include the cells lining the intestine and stomach, and the blood-cell producing cells in the bone marrow.

The extent of the damage caused is dependent on how long people are exposed to radiation, and at what level.

Radiation and cancer

• Most experts agree even small doses of ionising radiation - as low as 100 millisieverts - can increase the risk of cancer, but by a very small amount.
• In general, the risk of cancer increases as the dose of radiation increases. Exposure to one sievert of radiation is estimated to increase the lifetime risk of fatal cancer by around 5%.
• The thyroid gland and bone marrow are particularly sensitive to ionising radiation.
• Leukaemia, a type of cancer that arises in the bone marrow, is the most common radiation-induced cancer. Leukaemia may appear as early as a few years after radiation exposure.
• Other cancer can also result from exposure to radiation, but may not develop for at least a decade. These include cancers of the lung, skin, thyroid, breast and stomach.

What are the most likely long-term health effects?

Cancer is the biggest long-term risk. Usually when the body's cells reach their "sell-by date" they commit suicide. Cancer results when cells lose this ability, and effectively become immortal, continuing to divide and divide in an uncontrolled fashion.

The body has various processes for ensuring that cells do not become cancerous, and for replacing damaged tissue.

But the damage caused by exposure to radiation can completely disrupt these control processes, making it much more likely that cancer will result.

Failure to properly repair the damage caused by radiation can also result in changes - or mutations - to the body's genetic material, which are not only associated with cancer, but may also be potentially passed down to offspring, leading to deformities in future generations. These can include smaller head or brain size, poorly formed eyes, slow growth and severe learning difficulties.

Are children at greater risk?

Potentially yes. Because they are growing more rapidly, more cells are dividing, and so the potential for things to go wrong is greater.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in the Ukraine in 1986, the World Health Organization recorded a dramatic increase in thyroid cancer among children in the vicinity.

This was because the radioactive materials released during the accident contained high levels of radioactive iodine, a material that accumulates in the thyroid.

What risk does Fukushima pose currently?

The Japanese authorities have recorded a radiation level of up 400 millisieverts per hour at the nuclear plant itself.

Professor Richard Wakeford, an expert in radiation exposure at the University of Manchester, said exposure to a dose of 400 millisieverts was unlikely to cause radiation sickness - that would require a dose of around twice that level (one sievert/one gray).

However, it could start to depress the production of blood cells in the bone marrow, and was likely to raise the lifetime risk of fatal cancer by 2-4%. Typically, a Japanese person has a lifetime risk of fatal cancer of 20-25%.

A dose of 400 millisieverts is equivalent to the dose from 50 -100 CT scans.

Prof Wakeford stressed only emergency workers at the plant were at risk of exposure to such a dose - but it was likely that they would only be exposed for short periods of time to minimise their risk.

He suggested the upper limit of their exposure would be 250 millisieverts - around 12 times the normal permitted annual exposure limit in the workplace.

However, even a dose of 100 millisieverts over a year is enough to raise the risk of cancer, and a dose of 250 millisieverts could raise lifetime risk by around 1%.

The level of exposure for the general population, even those living close to the plant, was unlikely to be anywhere near as high. There should be no risk to people living further afield.

What radioactive materials have been released?

Experts are concerned about two types of radioactive material, created as by-products of the nuclear fission process, both of which can contaminate the soil relatively easily, and get into the food chain.
The radioactive form of iodine - iodine 131 - is easily absorbed by the thyroid, the gland which regulates growth and cell production.

This would raise the risk of thyroid cancer.

To counter that risk, people - in particular children - can be given tablets containing a stable form of iodine which would prevent the body absorbing the radioactive version.

Radioactive iodine decays quite quickly and will disappear from the environment within weeks or months.

The Japanese already have a lot of iodine in their natural diet, so that should help too.
Another potential source of contamination is the radioactive form of the metal caesium (caesium 137), which once released into the environment continues to pose a potential risk for many years.

This form of the metal is in a near-liquid state at room temperature, and can get into the soft body tissue, muscle and bone, where it can cause cancer.

How can the Japanese authorities minimise the cost to human health?

Prof Wakeford said that provided the Japanese authorities acted quickly, most of the general population should be spared significant health problems.

He said in those circumstances the only people likely to be at risk of serious health effects were nuclear workers at the plant or emergency workers exposed to high levels of radiation.

The top priority would be to evacuate people from the area and to make sure they did not eat contaminated food.

Distribution of iodine pills would also help to minimise the risk of thyroid cancer in the general population.

Is there evidence that food has been contaminated?

Yes. Japan's health ministry has urged some residents near the plant to stop drinking tap water after samples showed elevated levels of radioactive iodine - about three times the normal level.

Radioactive iodine has also been found in water supplies in Tokyo at twice the levels deemed safe in Japan for babies and infants to drink, although still some way short of the safety level for adults.

Raised radiation levels have also been found in samples of milk and spinach, in some cases well outside the 20km exclusion zone.

However, there is no suggestion that these levels of radiation pose any immediate threat to human health.
Japan's chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano, said the level of radioactivity found in the spinach would, if consumed for a year, equal the radiation received in a single CAT scan. For the milk, the figure would be much less.

Professor Wakeford stressed that safe limits for radiation in food were kept extremely low, so people should not necessarily be unduly worried by reports that they had been breached.

For instance, the level of radioactive iodine recorded in water supplies in Tokyo would result in an adult being exposed to far less than the level of radiation from natural background sources - even if they drank water contaminated at that level every day for a year.

What is the threat to Tokyo residents from contaminated tap water?"

Officials said the tap water showed 210 becquerels per litre of iodine-131 - more than twice the recommended limit of 100 becquerels per litre for infants. The recommended limit for adults is 300 becquerels. (Becquerels is a measure of radiation emmitted whereas millisieverts is a measure of dosage on the body).

Professor Richard Wakeford says that infants who drank water contaminated at the Japanese limit of 100 becquerels for a year would effectively receive a dose of 0.4 millisieverts of radiation.

Adults who drank water contaminated at the Japanese limit of 300 becquerels for a year would effectively receive a dose of 0.3 millisieverts of radiation.
In comparison, the average person is exposed to 2.5 millisieverts from natural background radiation in a year.

In theory, drinking water contaminated at 210 becquerels for a year would cause a very small additional risk of cancer - but in practice nothing more than you could expect to get from normal background levels of radiation.

Is it safe to bathe or wash food in contaminated tap water?

Yes, because only small amounts of water would be ingested into the body from these practices.

What about contaminated seawater?

Levels of radioactive iodine-131 in seawater near the nuclear plant have reached 3,355 times the legal safety limit.

Japanese officials admitted the reading was a concern - but said there was no immediate threat to human health.

Professor Wakeford said it would be sensible to ensure that contaminated fish did not enter the food chain.
However, he stressed that radioactive iodine would be diluted by the ocean currents, and would, in any case, breakdown almost completely within three months.

How does Fukushima compare to Chernobyl?

Professor Gerry Thomas, who has studied the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, said: "It is very unlikely that this will turn into anything that resembles Chernobyl.

"In Chernobyl you had a steam explosion which exposed the reactor core, which meant you had a lot of radiation shooting up into the atmosphere."

Prof Thomas said although the Chernobyl disaster had led to a rise in thyroid cancer cases, the only people affected were those living in the areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia that lie closest to the site of the Chernobyl Power Plant, and who were young at the time.

What if the situation deteriorates?

If there were to be a meltdown or a fire at the nuclear plant, and unfavourable winds, then experts say radioactive material could reach as far as Tokyo, 150 miles (241km) away.

However, even in that situation, the level of radiation is likely to be such that simple measures, such as staying indoors with windows closed, should neutralise the risk.

***A superb follow up article by renowned nuclear activist & physician Dr. Helen Caldicott

Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Radiation