[ RadSafe ] KABC TV Los Angeles and KGO TV San Francisco Report on Fukushima

Thu Nov 14 19:26:56 CST 2013

Sorry about that - apparently the page has changed.  While looking for
this, I found another story that I did not notice last year - the claim of
potentially 30 deaths from Fukushima in US seems pretty far fetched despite
the Stanford connection to the "research".  I will find the new link
probably from KABC-TV in LA.  I have had fairly positive replies from Dan
Ashley at KGO so maybe they removed the story from their website, but I
doubt that happened.

Roger Helbig

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=8742223

California News
Researchers estimate more deaths from Fukushima fallout
Thursday, July 19, 2012
<javascript:void(0);>
 by Susanne Rust for California Watch

New research suggests that the cancer and death toll from Fukushima may be
higher than previously claimed.

According to a team of Stanford University researchers, most of these
deaths will likely occur in Japan, but there could be as many as 30
casualties from radiation exposure in North America.

These numbers are in addition to the roughly 600 people who died as result
of the evacuation near Fukushima after the plant's meltdown in March 2011.

Related Content
link: More stories from California Watch <http://californiawatch.org/>
The new estimates stand in stark contrast to others, including the United
Nations Science Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, which
suggested there would be no deaths as a result of the radioactive release.

Mark Jacobson <http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/>, co-author of
the study and an environmental and civil engineer at Stanford University,
said he didn't have any expectations when he started looking into the issue
but wasn't surprised that the claim of "zero health impacts" was not
correct.

"I am very familiar with the health impacts of air pollutants and
particulate matter," Jacobson said. "If you reduce the concentration you'll
have fewer health impacts. Why should this be any different?"

To get a handle on how the radiation was distributed, Jacobson and Ten
Hoeve, another Stanford researcher, used a 3-D global atmospheric model
they actively use to track and trace pollutants across the globe. The model
is based on more than 20 years of research collected by Jacobson, who is
particularly interested in the migration of pollutants from mainland Asia
to California.

So, when the Fukushima disaster happened, he figured he'd throw radiation
into the analysis and build a model that could track the released iodine
and cesium.

Not surprisingly, it moved around in similar fashion to other pollutants,
with iodine behaving like a gas and cesium like a particulate. With
prevailing westerly winds, only about 19 percent of the fallout made it to
land, and the rest drifted out to sea.

The researchers then combined that information with a standard
health-effects model, which is used by public health researchers to
estimate exposure to radioactivity.

They found that the number of deaths would likely range between 15 and
1,300, with a best estimate of 130, while the number of people acquiring
cancer as a result would range between 24 and 2,500, with a best estimate
of 180.

Most deaths and cancer cases are likely to occur in Japan, but there may be
a few in mainland Asia and as far away as North America.

"These worldwide levels are relatively low," Hoeve said in a press
statement. He said these numbers should "serve to manage the fear in other
countries that the disaster had an extensive global reach."

The research appears in Tuesday's journal Energy and Environmental
Science<http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ee/c2ee22019a>
.

Paul Carroll, program director of the Ploughshares Fund, an antinuclear
organization, said he thought the casualties seemed a little low and
stressed that this kind of epidemiological data is highly uncertain.

"It is extremely difficult to predict the long-term effects of radiation,
especially when you start factoring in things like different types of
radiation, at different levels, at constant low levels, on different
people," he said.

"It's the difference between death by a thousand cuts or death by a
guillotine," he explained. "So much of our data is based on large doses of
exposure to radiation, not the constant, low levels. Which cut eventually
killed the person? The 999th or the 1,000th?"

Jacobson agreed that the epidemiological data is the most uncertain, which
is why their projected ranges were so wide.

But he said one of the reasons the deaths may seem so low is that only
about 19 percent of the fallout found its way to land; the rest went out to
sea.

If the same accident had happened at Diablo Canyon, Jacobson said, 45
percent of the radiation would find its way to land. Therefore, despite the
fact that the population density around Diablo Canyon is a fourth of that
around the Japanese power plant, the death rate would be 25 percent higher.

Jacobson said one of the most important factors, however, in keeping deaths
from climbing in a disaster like this is a swift government response. And
it is likely, in large part, the Japanese government's response that
prevented Fukushima from becoming Chernobyl, where nothing was done to
remove people from the surrounding area.

*Story courtesy of our media partners at California Watch
<http://californiawatch.org/> (A Project of the Center for Investigative
Reporting)*

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Brent Rogers <brent.rogers at optusnet.com.au
> wrote:

> Tried link.  URL NOt Found
>
> Brent
>
> Brevity alert: Sent from my iPad
>
> > On 13 Nov 2013, at 19:09, Roger Helbig <rwhelbig at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > KGO Anchor Dan Ashley is very receptive to comments on this very badly
> done
> > report by a reporter who was in Japan after the tsunami.   I wrote to him
> > after seeing the teaser during Jeopardy this evening and he wrote back.
>  I
> > watched the 11PM news and it was worse than I had imagined.
> >
> > http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=9323780
> >
> > Roger Helbig
> > _______________________________________________
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