The Japanese government has taken its time to release detail about the radiation generated by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima’s Daicha power plant.
Initial inertia was caused by shock as Japan was overwhelmed by the scale of the earthquake and tsunami, and political reluctance to reveal the truth. In August 2011, however, the government revealed that around 15,000 tera becquerels of caesium-137 had been released since the three reactors were cracked by the earthquake and tsunami on 11th March 2011.
That amount of radiation is equivalent to 168 Hiroshima bombs.
The uranium bomb which the United States dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II released 89 tera becquerels. It killed 140,000 people – many instantly, others within weeks of the blast as they succumbed to severe radiation burns.
The estimate of radiation released at Fukushima was made by Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan’s government.
Radiation from Fukushima has, to date, not been officially recorded as resulting in any deaths. Radiation leaking from molten fuel inside nuclear reactors – as at Fukushima – does not affect human and animal life in the same way as a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is, clearly, designed to cause mass destruction by creating blast waves and intense heat.
At Fukushima, the problem of radioactive contamination is a longer term one. It’s certainly possible that residents in the immediate vicinity of the cracked reactors will suffer radiation effects as time passes. The workers who struggled inside the plant to cool the reactors and prevent meltdown are even more at risk. They were exposed to radioactivity at the height of the crisis.
The Japanese government created a 12 mile no-go zone around Fukushima after the disaster and recent government figures revealed radiation readings inside the zone of more than 500 millisieverts per year. That level of contamination is 25 times higher than Japan’s official safety limit.
There is also the problem of radioactive contamination of seawater and sealife since seawater was used in attempts to cool the reactors. Most of that water ran back into the sea – taking radioactive contamination with it.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8722400/Fukushima-caesium-leaks-equal-168-Hiroshimas.html