Fukushima and Chernobyl, similar but different

Early on, Japan’s official Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) didn’t think the damage at Fukushima was serious enough to be considered an “accident.” Ten hours after the plant was struck by an earthquake and battered by a tsunami, NISA called the situation a “serious incident,” a level 3 ranking on the IAEA scale. Even after radiation levels in the Fukushima main control room had spiked to 1,000 times normal levels, radioactive steam had been vented into the environment, and hydrogen explosions had demolished large parts of two reactor buildings, sending radioactive debris a thousand feet into the air, NISA only raised the threat assessment to level 5 — the same as the far less catastrophic accident at Three Mile Island.

Only on April 12, over a month after the crisis began, did NISA upgrade the crisis at Fukushima to level seven.

“In hindsight, their assessment of the situation was faulty,” says professor emeritus of nuclear engineering, Kenji Sumita.

The Soviet police-state clampdown on information about Chernobyl was many times worse. People surrounding the area (in what is now Ukraine) were told that a nuclear power plant had experienced only a minor accident. They weren’t told that plumes of intensely radioactive smoke were blowing across fields where dairy cows grazed. Unsuspecting resident gave their children milk with high levels of radioactive iodine, causing a spike in thyroid cancers starting ten years later.

Although thyroid cancer is treatable if caught early, and rarely results in death, the residents around Chernobyl were never told that they had been exposed to radiation and needed annual thyroid checkups. Many died needlessly.

One of the biggest differences between what happened at Chernobyl and the crisis at Fukushima is the amount of resources the two countries possess to minimize long-term effects. The Soviet Union was, we now know, facing financial collapse. Though it spent billions on Chernobyl, it simply abandoned vast amounts of contaminated land — making them into exclusions zones.

So apparently the difference is Japan isn't lying as much to the world as Russia did during Chernobyl. Of course this wonderfully in depth article doesn't even go into the differences of the nuclear explosions or meltdowns. Thanks Forbes! Oh yeah, that's right you only care about money.

Source: Forbes