Photo credit IAEA
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While the worst fears from last year’s radiation release from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster have not been realized, the long-term health impacts remain largely unknown.
Today, researchers at Stanford University have released a modeling study – published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science – that attempts to quantify the mortality and morbidity due to that nuclear release.
Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
John E. Ten Hoeve and Mark Z. Jacobson
Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, Advance Article
Abstract
A 3-D global atmospheric model evaluated against data is used to quantify worldwide health effects from the Fukushima nuclear accident.
As you will see, the actual numbers are fairly low, but the range of possibilities is considerable. The press release from Stanford University provides us with the details.
Stanford researchers calculate global health impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster
Radiation from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may eventually cause anywhere from 15 to 1,300 deaths and from 24 to 2,500 cases of cancer, mostly in Japan, Stanford researchers have calculated.
The estimates have large uncertainty ranges, but contrast with previous claims that the radioactive release would likely cause no severe health effects.
The numbers are in addition to the roughly 600 deaths caused by the evacuation of the area surrounding the nuclear plant directly after the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdown.
Recent PhD graduate John Ten Hoeve and Stanford civil engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, are set to publish their findings Tuesday (July 17) in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. The research constitutes the first detailed analysis of the event's global health effects.
As Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin George E. P. Box famously observed:
“All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
While this study may not be the last word on the health impacts from Fukushima, and it only provides a range of effects, it at least provides a starting point.
Interestingly, the authors modeled what a similar meltdown would look like if it occurred in the United States.
From the press release:
To test the effects of varying weather patterns and geography on the reach of a nuclear incident, the two researchers also analyzed a hypothetical scenario: an identical meltdown at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, near San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Despite California's population density being about one-fourth that of Japan's, the researchers found the magnitude of the projected health effects to be about 25 percent larger.
The model showed that rather than being whisked toward the ocean, as with Fukushima, a larger percentage of the Diablo Canyon radioactivity deposited over land, including population centers such as San Diego and Los Angeles.
Jacobson stressed, however, that none of the calculations expressed the full scope of a nuclear disaster.
"There's a lot more to the issue than what we examined, which were the cancer-related health effects," he said. "Fukushima was just such a large disaster in terms of soil and water contamination, displacement of lives, confidence in government oversight, cost and anguish."
In May we saw the WHO Report On Radiation Exposure From Fukushima Reactor Accident, which concluded that:
. . . the estimated effective doses outside Japan from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident are below (and often far below) dose levels regarded as being very small by the international radiological protection community. Low effective doses are also estimated in much of Japan.
Another report is expected from the World Health Organization later this summer that will attempt to quantify the short and long term health-risk due to exposure to radioactivity from Fukushima.
It will be interesting to compare those findings with the ones released today.
