An anti-nuclear rally in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture, in March marking the first anniversary of the radiation disaster that followed the explosions and triple meltdown at the six-reactor Fukushima complex. A UN rights investigator said Nov. 26 that Japan needs to do more to help those contaminated by the disaster. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters) 

When the Fukushima nuclear reactor complex in Japan went into earthquake-caused radioactive apoplexy on March 11, 2011, the Japanese government immediately began minimizing the risks of radiation and the known and potential effects of radiological catastrophe. One expert observer, Dr. Chris Busby, a founder of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and scientific secretary of the Low-Level Radiation Campaign, warned on March 16, “Reassurances about radiation exposures issued by the Japanese government cannot be believed.”

    Now, 20 months later, comes the United Nations “special rapporteur on the right to health,” with a draft report charging that Japan “has adopted overly optimistic views of radiation risks and has conducted only limited health checks” among contaminated populations. The AP and CBC reported Nov. 26 that according to Anand Grover, the UN investigator, “Japan hasn’t done enough to protect the health of residents and workers affected.”

    Previous investigations found that monitoring data from the federal system that tracks plumes of radiation during disasters was kept secret when it was needed most. The press disclosed in August 2011 that the system forecast that Karino Elementary School in the town of Namie would be directly in the path of the [radiation] plume spewing from the destroyed reactors. Yet the warning never reached decision-makers and neither the school nor the town was evacuated. Instead, they became evacuation centers where families even cooked and ate meals outdoors.

    The UN’s Grover severely criticized the government’s commitment to health care for exposed workers and people in contaminated areas, and complained that its ongoing health checks are “too narrow in scope because they are only intended to cover Fukushima’s two million people.” Surveys of health effects should extend to “all radiation-affected zones” Grover said, a vast area including much of the north-eastern half of Honshu, Japan’s main island.

    But so far, only one-quarter of Fukushima’s population has been surveyed. Grover says he thinks it’s unwise to check only children for thyroid damage. Indeed, Dr. Helen Caldicott told Business Insider last summer that even when lesions are found on a child’s thyroid, they aren’t being biopsied. The lesions “should all be biopsied,” Caldicott warned.

    Further minimizing the actual numbers of affected persons, thousands of reactor site workers with short-term contracts “have no access to permanent health checks,” Grover said and Fukushima residents complain that they have not been allowed access to their own health-check results.

    Last March, Human Rights Watch leveled the same charge. “We are really not seeing basic health services being offered in an accessible way and we are not seeing accurate, consistent, non-contradictory information being disclosed to people on a regular basis” Jane Cohen, a researcher at the New York-based rights group, told Reuters.

    The government’s denial and cover-up continue due to the colossal costs of acknowledging the depth and breadth of radiation’s possible effects. The Oct. 26 edition of the journal Science reported that 40 percent of the fish caught off the coast of NE Japan are contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels above what the government allows. The report’s author, Ken Buesseler of the influential Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, concluded that either there is a source of cesium somewhere on the seafloor, or that it is still being dumped into the sea by Tokyo Electric Power Co. at Fukushima.

    Referring to the millions of gallons of water that are being poured into Fukushima’s three destroyed reactors and their waste fuel pools to cool them, Buesseler told Radio Australia Nov. 20, “Some of that water is getting back into the ocean, either actively being pumped out after some decontamination or through leaks in the building, so [Tepco’s] not able to contain all of the water that they use to cool.”

    The government and TEPCO quickly moved to deny Science. The federal fisheries ministry claimed that Fukushima cesium — from the largest recorded spill of it to the oceans in history — is “sinking into the seabed” and no longer entering the food chain. Tepco representatives asserted that contaminated water was not leaking from anywhere around its six wrecked reactors.

— John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin.