Russia says Japan crisis now in worst case scenario
By Alexei Anishchuk
MOSCOW | Wed Mar 16, 2011 2:45pm EDT
(Reuters) - Japan's nuclear crisis is escalating according to the worst case scenario, potentially damaging future demand for atomic power stations, the head of Russia's state nuclear corporation said on Wednesday.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said atomic energy was safe if used properly, and he and visiting Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the two states would go ahead with plans for Russia to build Turkey's first nuclear power station.
Japan is struggling to avert a catastrophe at a nuclear power station damaged by the worst earthquake in its recorded history.
Sergei Kiriyenko, who presides over the bulk of the former Soviet Union's military and civilian nuclear facilities, told Reuters: "Unfortunately, the situation is developing under the worst scenario."
"We forecasted the scenario under which the other reactors would be affected, which unfortunately happened yesterday. So the worst scenario has been confirmed," he said.
Russia still did not have full information from Japan on the situation, Kiriyenko said, so Russian experts were having to model developments at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, some 800 km (500 miles) southwest of the Russian city of Vladivostok.
Kiriyenko, who often accompanies Russian leaders on trips abroad to seal multi-billion dollar nuclear deals, said the crisis was likely to have a negative impact on Russia's booming overseas nuclear power station construction business.
"Of course it will have an effect," he said when asked if it would hurt Russian sales of nuclear power stations.
"IT CAN BE AND IS SAFE"
The worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine is likely to sour public opinion on nuclear power, which accounts for 16 percent of Russian electricity.
After his talks with Erdogan, Medvedev told a briefing in the Kremlin: "Everyone is asking a simple question: can atomic energy be safe?
"The answer is clear: it can be and is safe, but for this it is necessary to make the right decisions about the location of the plant, about the design and the operator."
Russia said it would begin to evacuate the families of its diplomats serving in Japan this week. Russia's Far East -- a vast swathe of land home to 6.5 million people -- watched the surging radiation levels in Japan with trepidation.
Radiation levels in Vladivostok, a city of 600,000 people, rose to 14 microroentgens an hour at 0400 GMT, from 12 a day earlier, though they were well within norms.
Residents set up forum sites on the Internet to monitor and discuss radiation levels.
Паника насчет утечек радиации на японских АЭС, к сожалению, может сместить акценты с еще более страшных последствий землетрясения и цунами: в настоящее время тысячи людей остаются без крова на холодной погоде
Analysis: Japan radiation fears mask worse threats to health
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent
LONDON | Wed Mar 16, 2011 1:48pm EDT
(Reuters) - Panic over radiation leaks at a Japanese nuclear plant may be diverting attention from potentially worse threats to public health, like thousands of people living in the open in cold weather after a tsunami.
Experts said efforts in Japan should focus on ensuring safe drinking water and the disposal of sewage to prevent outbreaks of killer diseases such as typhoid and cholera, although the likelihood of any such epidemic was remote so far.
"People are getting so concerned about what are at the moment pretty low levels of radiation as far as the general public is concerned. But the real problems ... are in dealing with the earthquake and the tsunami," said Dr Richard Wakeford of Britain's University of Manchester.
"If this was a developing country, we'd have people going down in their hundreds and thousands with the likes of typhoid and cholera by now. The questions should be: Where is the sewage going? What is the state of the drinking water? If I were a public health official, that would be my principle concern."
Japan was hit by a massive earthquake on Friday that triggered a tsunami along its northeastern coast, leaving about 850,000 households without electricity and 1.5 million households without running water. More than 440,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, Japanese media said.
But it is the radiation emerging from the Fukushima nuclear plant in northern Japan that has preyed on people's minds, playing on fears of something that cannot be seen, touched and is poorly understood.
Experts say these fears could leave a lasting legacy.
Nick Pidgeon, a professor of public understanding of risk at Britain's Cardiff University, said nuclear radiation has several particular factors that make people uniquely and disproportionately afraid of it:
It's invisible, it's insidious, its effects are often very difficult to isolate and remain unclear many decades later, and its main risk -- cancer -- is itself a highly-dreaded disease.
"When you get all of those things together, it's almost a perfect storm of fear factors," he told Reuters.
This leads to what is known as the "social amplification of risk," he added. "And if people believe a risk to be real -- then it becomes real in its consequences."
ANXIETY
Studies of previous nuclear accidents have found the psychological impact of anxiety about radiation, and the rush to try to get away from it, is very real -- even if the actual health risks from radiation exposure are limited.
Experts on the perception of risk, and others who have spent years studying the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster say there is good reason for this.
"A key risk at present is public panic in response to this incident," said Professor Jim Smith, a specialist in earth and environmental sciences at Britain's Portsmouth University. He was speaking from Chernobyl where he has studied the effects of radiation for more than 20 years.