Fukushima: Ten years onFukushima: Ten Years On from the Disaster, Was Japan’s Response Right?
How should a government react when confronted by clear evidence of radioactive material being released into the environment? We set out to determine how best to respond to a severe nuclear accident using a science-led approach. Could we, by examining the evidence, come up with better policy prescriptions than the emerging playbook deployed in Ukraine and Japan? Together with colleagues, we used research methods from statistics, meteorology, reactor physics, radiation science and economics and arrived at a surprising conclusion.
The world saw something never before caught on camera on March 12, 2011: an explosion ripping the roof off a nuclear power plant – Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. The blast wasn’t actually nuclear, it was the result of hot hydrogen gas encountering the cool, outside air during the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. But the distinction hardly mattered – something had clearly gone terribly wrong.
A decade on from the tragedy, many people are still mourning the nearly 16,000 people who lost their lives to the tsunami. While no-one died from the radiation after the radiation accident at Fukushima Daiichi, roughly two thousand elderly people died prematurely as a result of their enforced evacuation and undoubtedly many more of the huge number of displaced people experienced distress. In order to minimize suffering in future nuclear accidents, there are important lessons from March 2011 that must be learned.
How should a government react when confronted by clear evidence of radioactive material being released into the environment? A precedent was set 25 years before, at Chernobyl in Ukraine. There, authorities evacuated the local population and have kept them away for decades, which was hugely expensive and disruptive for the communities involved.
While Japan was reeling from the natural disaster, the authorities imposed an evacuation order with a radius of 20km around the stricken nuclear plant. A total of 109,000 people were ordered to leave their homes, with a further 45,000 choosing to evacuate from places nearby, which added to the turmoil.
We set out to determine how best to respond to a severe nuclear accident using a science-led approach. Could we, by examining the evidence, come up with better policy prescriptions than the emerging playbook deployed in Ukraine and Japan? Together with colleagues at the universities of Manchester and Warwick, we used research methods from statistics, meteorology, reactor physics, radiation science and economics and arrived at a surprising conclusion.
Japan probably didn’t need to relocate anyone, and the evacuations after Chernobyl involved five to ten times too many people. In fact, because power plants are generally built some distance from towns and cities, very few of even the most severe nuclear accidents would warrant long-term population relocations.
