Nuclear engineer and outspoken critic of nuclear power, Koide Hiroaki, recently was interviewed on the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  He offers insights on the scale of the accident, how much radiation was released, the condition of the facility, the eventual cancers related to the disaster, and what more the world can expect in radioactive pollution.  The article is translated into English here:

Asia Pacific Journal, March 2016

A few highlights and commentary:

Those three reactors released 1.5×10¹⁶ Becquerels of Cs-137, which would make it a release of 168 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bombing. And this is only material released into the atmosphere-at least according to Japanese government estimates…Various experts and institutes from around the world have offered several of their own estimates…According to these other estimates I think that the release of Cs-137 into the atmosphere could be around 500 times the Hiroshima bombing.

In addition, Koide Hiroaki gave a talk at the symposium “The Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima” reproduced in the book Crisis Without End:  The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe by Helen Caldicot, where he stated that the spent fuel rods remaining at Fukushima contains “enough cesium-137 to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs” and that “if another earthquake occurs and should the spent-fuel pool collapse, it will be impossible to cool.”

The amount of products of nuclear fission released during atmospheric testing was enormous, and these particles continue to expose humans to radiation…And because of this testing, historically speaking, cancer rates have slowly risen; I believe this increase in cancer is due to the exposure suffered during the atmospheric testing. Now the radioactive material released from Fukushima has been dispersed across the globe and so once again everyone on earth has been exposed to additional radiation. I think we can expect cancer rates to rise once again.

Cancer is correlated to radiation exposure levels, and it is a certainty that which each increase of radiation in the environment, from accidents like Fukushima in the past and in the future, cancer rates will increase.  As the book, Heal and Protect: A Nuclear World makes clear, cancer rates will increase with women, children, and especially girls seeing the most cancer.

Because the west coast of the US is already contaminated from the atmospheric testing, though the dispersed contamination from Fukushima will reach US shores, for people living on the US west coast, the Fukushima accident―and this is perhaps awful to say―contamination from Fukushima is hardly worth considering. Historically a much greater event has already taken place.

But the current Japanese government has now stated that if contamination is under 20mSv/yr somewhere, that place is safe to return to―safe to return to even for children. This is way beyond common sense.

The latest report from the National Academy of Sciences committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII 2006) argues that 100mSv total lifetime exposure (5 years at the new Japanese limit) will cause cancers in 1% of people.  Worse, for children that number will be between 2 and 4%.

I believe the government has the responsibility to evacuate these entire communities. Instead of taking a proper action to secure people’s livelihood, the government decided to leave them exposed to the real danger of radiation…I think that even though it could bankrupt Japan, the government should have carried out the evacuation to set an example of what the government is supposed to do…They’ve decided to sacrifice people and…made the social decision to force people to endure their exposure. In my view, this is a serious crime committed by Japan’s ruling elite.

The radioactive water has penetrated the coastline around the Fukushima Daiichi. Underground water in the large area of Fukushima has been seriously contaminated. And at some point those contaminated water tanks will fail…Already in March of 2011 there was some 100,000 tons of contaminated water…Now there’s up-to 400,000 tons. In the near―meaning not too distant―future there will be nothing left but to release it into the sea. The water contains plutonium 239 and its release into the Ocean has both local and global impacts. A microgram of plutonium can cause death if inhaled.