Japan’s nuclear commission reveals Fukushima may have emitted more radioactive material than official Chernobyl totals

Published: April 13th, 2011 at 6:17 pm ET
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Japanese Officials on Defensive as Nuclear Alert Level Rises, New York Times, April 12, 2011:

… A senior executive said in a telephone interview on April 4 that he had been told that the Speedi [System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information] model suggested that radioactive materials escaping the Daiichi complex were much higher than Japanese officials had publicly acknowledged

[Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency] appears to have assumed that true emissions from Chernobyl were twice the official figure, and so calculated that the current nuclear accident had released 10 percent as much as Chernobyl. …

Although [Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission] did not provide a comparison to Chernobyl, [a release of 630,000 terabecquerels] works out to 34 percent of the official Soviet estimate of emissions and 17 percent of the unofficial higher estimate.

Mr. Shiroya also said there was a threefold margin for error involved. The outside estimates of total releases would range from as low as 6 percent to as high as 51 percent of the unofficial totals from Chernobyl. …

Read the report here.

The “34 percent of the official Soviet estimate of emissions from Chernobyl”, with “a threefold margin of error” makes the high end Fukushima estimate equal to 102% of Chernobyl’s official total.

Published: April 13th, 2011 at 6:17 pm ET
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