Japanese officials withheld radioactive fallout patterns: “akin to murder”

An August 8, 2011 New York Times story revealed that Japanese authorities in Tokyo deliberately abandoned their responsibilities to notify communities of the direction that radioactive fallout was blowing from the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.   

Given no guidance from the headquarters of the Japanese nuclear emergency agency, local community officials evacuated populations including women and children to Tsushima district, an area farther north that they believed to be in the opposite direction of where winter winds would carry the radioactive fallout to the south.  In fact, the wind blew clouds of radiation escaping from the badly damaged reactors directly toward Tsushima where evacuated children were playing outside and their unaware parents were gathering water from streams for cooking.

Emergency planning authorities later admitted that they had withheld computer predictions showing where the fallout would spread and denied the facts of the radioactive disaster very likely to limit the size of costly evacuations in “land scarce” Japan. The mayor of the town of Namie, just five miles from Fukushima nuclear power plant, described the misdeeds as “akin to murder.”

The scope and reality of evacuating and sheltering people from nuclear catastrophe is consistently downplayed among all nuclear nations. Just like the lie that government officials told tens of thousands of Japanese citizens to delay and cover up knowledge of the severity of the unfolding nuclear accident, the facts about the effectiveness of an emergency response often belie industry and government assurances even here in the United States. 

For example for the evacuation of children from the many schools located within the ten-mile emergency planning zone around US nuclear power plants, a 1985 UCLA study “Role Conflict in a Radiological Emergency: The Case of School teachers” identifies after a review of the facts surrounding the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and other nuclear accidents, teachers and bus drivers---who are essentially conscripted into participating in the evacuation of their students---are more likely to abandon this state assigned role to attend to their immediate families first.  The study’s findings are more recently reiterated by teachers from around New Hampshire’s Seabrook nuclear power plant, one who noted “the belief of a number of teachers and people familiar with this is the children can’t be safely evacuated in the amount of time necessary to protect their health.”