Japan reactor is no Chernobyl: experts
Posted 51 minutes ago
Experts say health risks from Japan's quake-hit nuclear power reactors seem fairly low and winds are likely to carry any contamination out to the Pacific without threatening other nations.
Authorities are fighting to avert a meltdown at stricken reactors at the Fukushima plant in the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Radiation levels were also up at the Onagawa atomic plant.
"This is not a serious public health issue at the moment," said Malcolm Crick, secretary of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
"It won't be anything like Chernobyl. There the reactor was operating at full power when it exploded and it had no containment."
As a precaution, around 140,000 people have been evacuated from the area around Fukushima.
Mr Crick said a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in the United States in 1979 - rated more serious than Japan's accident on an international scale - released low amounts of radiation.
"Many people thought they'd been exposed after Three Mile Island," he said.
"The radiation levels were detectable, but in terms of human health it was nothing."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) also said the public health risk from Japan's atomic plants remained "quite low".
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/14/3163166.htm?section=justin
I did hear the Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, say this morning that there was no real threat as the "whatever they are that are reactive" are contained and that their "cover" has not been breached.
I suppose though, that it isn't the best place to build nuclear reactors on a fault line.