Jan Beyea, from the US expert consulting service Consulting in the Public Interest, and fellow colleagues analyzing previous calculations of the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan believe the number of predicted future mortalities from cancer is higher than originally predicted.

“Health consequences predicted for the Fukushima Daiichi accident are dominated by ‘groundshine’ gamma radiation from the decay over several decades of dispersed radioactive caesium,” Beyea commented Friday in Energy & Environmental Journal. “Although an individual’s risk is small, the mid-range, predicted number of future mortalities from cancer is closer to 1000 than the 125 figure calculated without considering long-term groundshine [gamma radiation emitted from radioactive materials deposited on the ground].

University of Utah’s Lynn Anspaugh, who works in the radiology and reconstructing radiation doses field and who analyzed the Chernobyl accident, agrees that Beyea’s research shows inaccuracies in previous work.

Anspaugh believes the real question this work raises is about the future of nuclear power itself.

‘Both accidents had a root cause in poor judgments having been made by humans,” Anspaugh said. “If nuclear power is to have a future, its proponents must indicate how they can make such reactors fail safe and how they will assure that siting decisions do indeed take account of possible, or even likely, natural events.”

Beyea said, ‘Quantifying the psychological and physical effects of stress following large releases of radioactivity may be the next frontier in consequence analysis.”

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Citation: http://www.examiner.com/article/fukushima-cancer-deaths-8-times-more-than-predicted