The radiation escaping from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant could contaminate some of the nation’s food and water supplies, while also raising cancer risks for untold numbers of people, particularly children and unborn babies.
As Reuters reports, it still remains unclear whether the radiation coming out from the four reactors disastrously damaged by last weekend’s earthquake and tsunami will cause major harm in Japan or beyond. The impact largely depends on the amount and type of radioactive contamination that occurs.
Those factors remained unknowable Tuesday, as the nuclear emergency and humanitarian crisis escalated, and as Japanese officials continued to scramble to try to contain the damage to the power plant 150 miles north of Tokyo.
However, indications were becoming increasingly gloomy. As msnbc.com reports, experts are now calling the disaster worse than Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. And Japanese officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency that a spent fuel storage area had caught fire and that radioactivity was “being released directly into the atmosphere.”
In an address to the nation, Prime Minister Naoto Kan noted that radiation had spread from the malfunctioning reactors into the environment. “The radiation level has risen substantially,” Kan said. “The risk that radiation will leak from now on has risen.”
Experts cautioned that danger to the food supply could result from radioactive materials being absorbed into droplets of moisture in the air, and then falling on crops and into bodies of natural water in the region. And not only fruits and vegetables would be at risk. Cows, because of their grazing habits, are especially vulnerable to environmental exposure to radiation, which means that anyone who drinks their milk could be made sick as well.
“The explosions could expose the population to longer-term radiation, which can raise the risk of cancer. These are thyroid cancer, bone cancer and leukemia. Children and fetuses are especially vulnerable,” Lam Ching-wan, a chemical pathologist at the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters.
However, countermeasures can reduce the danger to the people most threatened, even if a meltdown causes massive emissions of radioactive materials. The Japanese government already has carried out massive evacuations within 12.5 miles of the nuclear plant, and instructed tens of thousands of more people within 19 miles to stay indoors.
The government also has a contingency plan in place to distribute potassium iodide pills, which prevent radioactive material from being absorbed by the thyroid, should the emissions increase further.
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