The news from Japan sounds terrifying _ radioactive steam spewing from nuclear reactor explosions and frantic efforts to prevent a meltdown. So far, though, the health threat is not substantial if details that officials have released are correct, radiation experts said.
Thyroid cancer is the most immediate risk, and the Japanese government is handing out pills to help prevent it. Worse case scenarios _ lots of radioactive fallout _ can lead to other cancers down the road, but that is not the situation now.
Even a meltdown would not necessarily mean medical doom. It depends on how well the containment vessels hold the melted fuel, and how much and what types of radioactive materials get released, radiation experts say.
“Right now the data that we’re getting shows that they’re small releases coming from the plant” and that they pose minimal health risk, said Kathryn Higley, a health physicist at Oregon State University. “This is not Chernobyl.”
The world has seen two big nuclear reactor scares _ in 1986 at the Chernobyl plant in Russia, and in 1979 at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
At Three Mile Island, even though a quarter of the reactor core melted, the steel containment structure held. The radiation released was so minuscule that it did not threaten health _ the equivalent of a chest X-ray to local folks.
At Chernobyl, where there was no containment vessel, far more radioactive material was released, and of a more dangerous type than at Three Mile Island. It stayed in soil and got into plants in the Ukraine, contaminating milk and meat for decades. Thousands of children developed thyroid cancer from radiation exposure, and scientists are still working to document other possible health problems.
The lessons have not been lost on the Japanese as they grapple with the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, whose cooling systems failed after a power outage from the massive earthquake last week.
They have evacuated 180,000 people from areas near the troubled reactors, where the relatively minimal fallout is mostly confined. They’ve told people still in the area to wear masks, which can keep radioactive particles from being inhaled.
Most importantly, they have stockpiled and are making plans to give out potassium iodide _ pills that can keep radioactive iodine from being taken up by the thyroid gland and causing cancer.
“Those are all preventable cancers” if the protective pills are taken right after exposure, said University of New Mexico radiologist Dr. Fred Mettler. He led an international group that studied health effects of the Chernobyl disaster and is a U.S. representative to the United Nations on radiation safety.
At Chernobyl “they had millions of square kilometers to cover and it was all rural areas and they didn’t really have anything stockpiled,” he said.
The Russian reactor also lacked a containment vessel like those in Japan and the United States to prevent or minimize release of the more dangerous types of radioactive materials, Mettler said.
So far in Japan, the radiation risk has been from the release of vapor from two explosions in other structures around the reactors. Some radioactive iodine has been released, and UN and Japanese officials have said that amount is not a major health concern. Iodine is relatively short-lived, and measures like those potassium iodide pills can be used to block its uptake.
Of greater concern is the possibility that some cesium may have been released _ a sign that the reactor rods may be damaged or melting. Cesium is absorbed throughout the body _ not just by the thyroid _ and stays in organs, tissue and the environment much longer, Mettler explained.
Cesium particles are relatively large and heavy, so they would not likely travel far in a plume. Most would drop near the reactor site, and if winds carry it east into the Pacific Ocean, it would be “no big deal” to human health, he said.
Kelly Classic, a Mayo Clinic physicist, agreed. She is a spokeswoman for the Health Physics Society, an organization of radiation safety specialists.
“Most of the contamination right now would be on the ground at the reactor site because there wasn’t much wind. That was almost the saving grace here,” she said.
Still, any release of cesium is a concern environmentally and for health, said Jacqueline Williams, a radiation biologist and safety expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York.
“Prior to Chernobyl, we believed that the cesium would be diluted out, that once the cloud went through and it rained, the cesium would be washed out. What we found out was there was an accumulation of cesium in certain types of vegetation, and it accumulated rather than diluted,” she said.
Animals fed on the vegetation and became contaminated, and meat and milk were affected.
“You can’t be quite so blase about the fallout,” Williams said.
At Three Mile Island, however, “the public health risk was close to zero because the radiation was contained within the site itself,” Williams said.
Mettler agreed. The research he led in Russia documented 6,000 to 7,000 additional cases of thyroid cancer in people who were children and teens when Chernobyl occurred, “and there are questionable increases of leukemia in the cleanup workers but it’s not certain.”
And were there long-lasting problems from Three Mile Island?
“Not that most of the scientific community believes,” Mettler said.
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Online:
NRC: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/rad-health-effects.html
Three Mile Island: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html
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