Fukushima radiation higher than thought

From Press TV: Fukushima radiation higher than thought

The wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have released twice as much radiation into the atmosphere as was previously estimated by the Japanese government.


The European and the US experts in their new estimation said the amount of the radioactive isotope caesium-137 released at the pick of Japan's nuclear crisis has been 35,800 terabecquerels; this comes while Japan's nuclear regulator had reported the release of 15,000 terabecquerels of caesium-137 in June.

According to the report published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the new estimated amount of nuclear release is equivalent to 42 percent of that from 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine during the soviet era.

The Japanese nuclear crisis began on 11 March 2011 after a 9-magnitude earthquake and a following tsunami hit the country including Fukushima Island.

The waves from the tsunami, which hit Fukushima nuclear plant 45 minutes after the quake, shut down the back-up generators. The early damage disabled the reactor's cooling systems, leading to meltdowns, explosions and radiation leaks.

The new study, on the other hand, says that the devastated plant had started releasing radioactive earlier due to the damages caused by the quake.

“This early onset of emissions is interesting and may indicate some structural damage to the reactor units during the earthquake,” said Andreas Stohl, an atmospheric scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research who led the study.

The new study has not considered the health aspects of the nuclear crisis because of the difficulty in measuring the radiation amounts people have received.

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has not yet commented on the new report.

The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) have not updated the figures on the amount of radiation discharged from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station.

Tepco said last week that the amount of radiation being released has fallen to about 8 million times less than that at the height of the disaster.