UK publishes transcript of Fukushima-Daiichi hearing

19 January 2012

About 30 workers at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan received between 100 millisieverts (mSv) and 250 mSv of radiation exposure, which would have increased their chances of cancer by about one percent to 2.5 percent, a parliamentary committee in the UK was told.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector of nuclear installations, Mike Weightman, told the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee that in terms of the workers, “there don’t appear to be any acute radiation effects”.

He said 30 of them have had “a significant dose”, but it is not in the sense of an immediate life-threatening dose.

In a declared nuclear emergency, the recommended limit is 100 mSv. The International Commission on Radiation Protection is mandated to sanction a maximum accumulated dose of 250 mSv in extraordinary circumstances.

Mr Weightman’s comments were published today as part of the minutes taken during the committee hearing in June 2011. The committee was hearing evidence into the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 and its implications for the UK nuclear industry.

Mr Weightman said public evacuation was well-organised and exposure countermeasures for the public have been “effective so far”, and there will be a longer-term health monitoring programme.

He said: “That is what we have advised the Japanese to do as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency mission that we have been on: to establish a long-term health monitoring programme... It is very difficult to see an excess of cancers in your population; you can make a theoretical prediction but that is different from actually detecting any change.”

Committee chairman Tim Yeo called Mr Weightman’s interim report into events at Fukushima-Daiichi “a beacon of objectivity and rationality amidst a lot of rather hysterical reaction to the accident in Japan”.

That report has since been released as a final report. It concluded there is no reason to curtail the operation of UK nuclear sites or to change siting strategies for new nuclear units in the UK.

Phillip Lee MP said during the committee meeting he was concerned that “we are all getting on the bandwagon”, not helped by “a rather odd decision” by the German government to phase out nuclear energy.

He said: “Greenpeace have published that six million people will be victims of Chernobyl. It strikes me that that is nonsense. The problem is that they are fostering the sort of belief that nuclear power is riskier than it actually is.”

Asked if there was any reason from a technical or engineering standpoint for Germany to close down its nuclear power stations Mr Weightman said: “I don't have access to the detailed basis upon which they have made their judgment, but from what I have seen I see no reason for it.”

Mr Weightman was also asked about problems getting information from Japan in the aftermath of the accident. He said: “I think there is some evidence that the industry in Japan has not been as forthcoming about incidents on its plants as we would expect and demand in the UK.

“I think we touched briefly on that in the report when we said that that led to people not trusting the information that was coming from Japan.”

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