A year after suffering the worst nuclear accident in its history, Japan is still struggling to understand what happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant in the country's northeast.
Last week, an independent commission released a report arguing that Japan narrowly averted what could have been a far deadlier disaster and that the government withheld this information from the public.
Organized by a civic group called the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, the commission included journalists, lawyers and scholars. Its chairman, Koichi Kitazawa, is former president of the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
The radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear plant came from the meltdown of three reactors, Kitazawa says.
But spent nuclear fuel rods at a fourth reactor were also at risk of leaking radiation or even exploding, and that, he says, could have put Fukushima on a par with the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986.
"The level of leakage of radioactivity reached about one-seventh of the Chernobyl case," Kitazawa says. "But it could have been almost the same as Chernobyl if these spent fuel rods started leaking."
Koichi Kitazawa, former director of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, heads the independent commission that investigated the Fukushima accident. The commission concluded that the government, and not a nuclear power company, should bear primary responsibility for the nation's nuclear safety.
If that had happened, he says, and if the winds had been blowing south toward Tokyo, instead of east over the Pacific Ocean, the consequences could have been unthinkable.The prime minister's office would have had to evacuate more than 30 million people in the capital area, Kitazawa says.
No comments:
Post a Comment