Radiation in Tokyo

Sometimes I can be a… a… drama queen. But this time I might be justified. Let me explain a number of facts.

1. Tokyo’s city and regional population is about 20 million.

2. The national government has a 20km exclusion zone around Fukushima nuclear power stations (owned and operated by TEPCO), which forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. Disrupting business, manufacturing, farming, schooling, families, friends, etc, whilst costing countless huge sums of money in expenses and lost productivity.

3. The US and Australian governments have established a non-enforceable and voluntary evacuation zone of 80kms of their citizens (image from BBC). The Australian, British, and US embassies have called for their citizens to evacuate Tokyo (BBC), whilst the French sent two chartered Air France flights to evacuate their citizens completely from Japan (all of Japan is excluded by the French). Furthermore, many countries have allowed their embassy staff families to evacuate from Tokyo. In reality, last week and earlier this week all those who left looked foolish for leaving because of the small incident that Fukushima seemed to be.

4. Someone connected to Chubu Electric (a central Japanese power company) has privately admitted to people I know that the Fukushima crisis is far worse than the government and TEPCO has publicly admitted.

5. Tokyo water supply was found to have radiation levels (NHK) in it unfit for children under 12 months to consume (and see BBC news story).

6. Now, a vegetable grown in Tokyo was found to have high levels of radiation in it (NHK). [image of Japanese grown spinach]

It seems that even the 80km exclusion zone announced by other countries was not sufficient, and there was indeed good reason to leave Tokyo. Why hasn’t the national government been more honest? Well, data readings of radiation detectors hasn’t suggested a major problem (I’ve been keeping an eye on this website: rdtn.org). Also, can you imagine evacuating 20 million people? Where do they go? It would simply destroy the Japanese economy. Japan would drop out of the G20 like a lead balloon, and I may be out of work, and out of a PhD before the summer (I’m just about to start the data collection phase this year).

Eat all your greens…