Bring on the Games

While Tokyo celebrates getting the 2020 Olympics, a video blogger in Fukushima City reminds us of the enduring legacy of the 'closing ceremony' of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

So Japan has been awarded the 2020 Olympics, and Shinzo Abe says he is more delighted than when he became prime minister. Nice for him. He spoke almost as if it were all about him. I could be annoyed by this turn of events, but I have to admit that it will make for good drama over the next few years in a mixed genre combining comedy, horror and organized crime, better than any of those surrealistic dream sequences Tony Soprano ever went through.

The essence of all good narrative fiction is that the audience knows what the protagonist does not, and this gap in knowledge is what creates the dramatic tension as they watch him walking blindly toward his tragic ending or comeuppance. We watch him move through the plot thinking, “no, don’t open that door” but we know he will. He must. In the next episode it’s a door he should open, but doesn’t, and he passes up his last chance at salvation. In this sense, Shinzo Abe is the perfect hapless antihero. He’s haunted by the ghost of his grandfather (a post-war prime minister), he’s got a big heart and all that sad ambition to restore his nation’s lost glory, but when there is a mistake to be made, he will make it.

If the Fukushima Daiichi disaster were a cable TV drama, the writers would sit around a table hashing out ideas about how to stretch and build up the suspense for another season. It would be too boring if the characters just plodded ahead with logical, cautious solutions like turning away from nuclear power. At some point, some young genius writer would say, “OK, get this. The country is broke. They borrow half the national budget every year. Government debt is 230% of GDP – totally un-repayable without a national default. A nuclear disaster in the hinterland is unresolved and threatens to become a global catastrophe. So what do they do? They double down on bread and circuses! Get this: they decide they want to host the Olympics – no one thinks they’ll get it, but the IOC actually lets them have it! With this, we’ve got enough for seven more seasons before we have to wind it down in a grand finale.” The idea might be a hard sell at first. The show runner wouldn’t be convinced easily that the audience could accept the plausibility of it. But they go with it, and it’s a hit!

Alas, too bad it’s not fiction. Nonetheless, it’s going to be interesting to watch this story unfold between now and 2020. Shinzo Abe has set the stage well. All his ducks are in a row. His country awaits either his promised Disneyesque happy ending or a run-up to a Shakespearean downfall punctuated with much awesome hubris and comic relief.

While the country was rejoicing the IOC announcement on September 8, youtube user Birdhairjp had been kind enough to remind us of what life is like on the ground in the still very-inhabited Fukushima City. This drama doesn’t have high ratings. On the ground, literally, there are 20 microsieverts per hour hitting the Geiger counter – 400 times above those safe levels in Tokyo that Shinzo Abe described to the IOC last week. Birdhairjp has shared a video demonstrating the radiation hazard outside the Abukuma Incinerator in Fukushima City. He is to be commended for producing this video and sharing it with the world, and also for demonstrating to other Japanese citizens that they need not be shy about getting their message to the world in other languages. As he proves in this case, simple English can be enough to get the point across.

I thought it would be helpful to put the data from his video in context of international norms for radiological protection.

For conversion:

1 Sievert = 1,000 millisieverts, 1 millisievert = 1,000 microsieverts

There are  8,760 hours in a year, so in the tables below the risk of the radiation levels at the incinerator are shown as the accumulated annual doses to someone who is exposed to these levels of microSv/hr for a whole year. Note that at ground level the feet get a much higher dose than the chest:

Table 1. Outside the Abukuma incinerator, Fukushima City

(55km from Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Plant)

	microSv/hour	mSv/year
at chest level	varies from 0.82 ~1.27	7.18 ~ 11.13
at feet	20.46	179.23

Table 2. For comparison, other times and places in Japan

natural background level in Japan before 2011	about 0.05 microSv/hour
present background level in Narita, Chiba (200 km from Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Plant)	0.12 microSv/hour = 1 mSv/year

Table 3 and Table 4, showing international norms in effect in 2007, are from data compiled from Nucleonica Wiki.

For occupational exposures, the 1990 recommendations of the ICRP limit the effective dose to 100 mSv in a 5 year period (giving an annual value of 20 mSv).

Table 3

	Euratom	ICRP	IAEA	Germany	Japan after its nuclear disaster
Dose limits for members of public, for whole body exposure	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	changed from 1 mSv/y to 20 mSv/y

Table 4

	Euratom	ICRP	IAEA	Germany
Dose limits for exposed nuclear industry workers, for whole body exposure	100 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y
Limit on effective dose for exposed workers in a consecutive 5-year period:	100 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y
Maximum effective dose in any single year:	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y
Equivalent dose limit to the fetus, accumulated during the pregnancy	1 mSv	2 mSv		1 mSv
pregnant woman				2mSv/mo.
total work life (50 years)				400 mSv

Of course, no one stays all the time in one spot like the one outside the Abukuma incinerator. Some places have higher or lower radiation, and levels are lower indoors. It is impossible to know the accumulated annual dose people receive as they move about Fukushima City over a year. Officials don’t seem to be collecting this data, for obvious reasons. This video shows that the radiation level is high around this incinerator, and probably others, so this implies also that people are being further exposed to internal contamination as they breathe in the emissions from such facilities.  

Although there are variations in exposure levels, it is clear that residents of Fukushima City are being exposed to levels far above the international standards for the public. They are more likely to get exposures equivalent to those which are allowed for nuclear industry workers, and in some cases even more. This applies to adults, children, pregnant women and fetuses. Exposing a child to 20 mSv is the equivalent of two adult full body CT scans. Adults are advised not to have even one of these without a compelling medical reason for it.

Japanese officials simply decided that the economic and social impacts of evacuation outweigh the risks to health, which the WHO claims to be only a small percentage increase in lifetime risk of getting cancer. All other health effects are ignored, and they would be difficult to link definitively to radiation exposure. The global nuclear industry says now, in retrospect, the exposure limits for the public and for nuclear workers were overly conservative and established with normal operations in mind. They say that actually there are only very minimal risks at levels up to 100 mSv, so in an emergency we should all relax and just live with the higher levels. Would you abandon your home and livelihood just because of a sudden small increase in the risk of getting cancer twenty years or more in the future?

Only time will tell the result of this human experiment, but before the IOC vote last week Shinzo Abe said the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster has harmed no one. This was a shamelessly false claim that cannot be supported by any evidence. It may be equally difficult to prove harm, but scientific knowledge is developed enough to let us know that the amount of radiation released had to have done some harm. Just ask the sailors on the US Ronald Reagan who were stationed offshore assisting with disaster relief. Because Abe made this statement to the IOC, he showed that he is either a shameless liar or shamelessly (willfully?) ignorant about the grave dangers that Fukushima Daiichi still poses to his country.

As much as this is a dramatic illustration of a population suddenly being put at risk for the convenience of the majority, it is not much different from other atrocious situations advanced civilizations impose on the unfortunate minorities who live in the shadow of the energy industry. Just two examples: native people in Northern Alberta have been poisoned by the exploitation of the tar sands, and the people in the coal mining regions of West Virginia have been horribly poisoned for over a century. The majority living in big cities ignores them, but they too live in their own toxic clouds. This is what we do. Bring on the games.