Sizing Up Health Impacts a Year After Fukushima

Health impacts from the radioactive materials released in the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns will probably be too small to be easily measured, according to experts assembled by the Health Physics Society for a panel discussion on Thursday. And the area cordoned off by the Japanese government as uninhabitable is probably far too large, the experts said.

The panel discussion, at the National Press Club in Washington, is one in a series of events timed to the first anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident at the nuclear plant in March 2011. While the quake and tsunami killed an estimated 20,000 people, radiation has not killed anyone so far, and members of the Health Physics Society, drawn from academia, medicine and the nuclear industry, suggested that the doses were too small to have much effect.

“There’s no opportunity for conducting epidemiological studies that have any chance of success,’’ said one of the panelists, John Boice Jr., a cancer epidemiologist and professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. (Dr. Boice is in line to become president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a nonprofit organization chartered by Congress.)

“The doses are just too low,’’ he said. “If you were to do a proposal, it would not pass a scientific review.’’

Another panelist, Kathryn A. Higley, a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Oregon State University in Newport, Ore., who holds a doctorate in radiological health sciences, concurred. “From a radiological perspective we expect the impact to be really pretty minor,’’ she said.

Not that the additional radiation exposure won’t induce a few extra cases of cancer, the experts said, but these will be indistinguishable from the background rate of cancer, which will eventually strike about 41 out of every 100 people.

The overall theme of the discussion was that radiation is widely feared but poorly understood, and is a smaller problem than the vast destruction and loss of life caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, who has worked as a consultant to the Japanese government on the accident and who helped treat radiation victims at Chernobyl, said that the risk of radiation exposure was a big concern for temporary workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant..

But many of them poorly understand the risks, he said. “Usually, when they discuss these issues, what does it mean to get 15 millisieverts, it’s in an izakaya, a Japanese bar, he said. Fifteen millisieverts is as much radiation as most Americans get in three to five years from natural background radiation and about three-quarters of the amount that most American reactor operators set as an annual limit for their personnel.

But the panelists acknowledged some uncertainty about the doses; among other problems, the tsunami and power failure knocked out some radiation-monitoring equipment.

Dr. Gale said that some of the areas that have been evacuated probably suffered so little contamination that they could be reoccupied, but that it was easier to set the lines simply by drawing a radius around the plant. And even if some people’s homes could be occupied, he said, people might not want to go back.

“There are a large number of people who want to go home, but they can’t go home because there are no schools,’’ he said. “You need schools, you need hospitals, you need 7-Eleven’s.”

 NY Times