Japanese Nuclear Disaster: Now they’re finding plutonium

  • Published on March 28th, 2011

fallout shelterTests have turned up plutonium in the soil around the trashed Fukushima reactor.

It appears that leaks have been worse than we’ve been told.  But true to form, authorities still insist it’s no big deal.

“It is not a health risk to humans,” Tokyo Electric Power Company told CNN late Monday. But it added, “Just in case, TEPCO will increase the monitoring of the nuclear plant grounds and the surrounding environment.”

If you don’t find that reassuring, you shouldn’t. CNN noted in the same article,

The company said it was equivalent to the amounts that fell on Japan following aboveground nuclear weapons tests by other countries in past decades.

…It can be a serious health hazard if inhaled or ingested, but external exposure poses little health risk, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…. All three isotopes have long half-lives, with plutonium-239 taking 24,000 years to lose half its radioactivity. Plutonium-238 has an 87-year half-life, while plutonium-240’s is more than 6,500 years.

And as we’ve pointed out before, it is precisely the inhalation or ingestion that is the problem. And once this stuff gets in the air, some of it IS going to get inhaled or ingested.

There was a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute in 2002 that admitted that the atomic testing series created more problems – and more deaths – than the government was ever willing to admit.

“What we know is maybe the tip of the iceberg here,” Sen. Tom Harkin, (D-IA), told CNN. “We know that there’s been upwards of perhaps 15,000 deaths that are attributable to these nuclear tests.”

It’s not the background radiation that kills – it’s the hot spots. And with a only few dozen testing stations, the authorities rarely find the hundreds or thousands of hot spots scattered across hundreds of thousands of square miles.

-> Next page: Did radiation kill John Wayne?

About the Author

Jeremy Bloom is the Editor of RedGreenAndBlue. He lives in New York, where he combines his passion for the environment with his passion for film, and is working on making the world a better place.

2 comments

  • “Half the population of St. George also died of cancer.”

    Are you sure that’s true? I think it’s pretty clear that the area has a way higher instance of lymphoma and related cancers years later (I wrote a major paper in college on the interplay between nuclear tests in Nevada and downwind Mormon populations in Utah), but that’s a pretty terse way to end the article…

    • I was unable to verify that number… so I’ve updated the story to reflect that. Should have been more careful – I’d already seen that a lot of these news reports have garbled numbers (some taking the original report of 91 cancers from those on the set of The Conqueror and turning it into 91 deaths, for instance). This one may be similar – taking a report of half of one particular neighborhood coming down with cancer, and turning that into half the town dying of it.

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