Eleanor Hall reported this story on Monday, March 28, 2011 12:26:00

ELEANOR HALL: A nuclear medicine expert who was part of the medical relief effort after Chernobyl says the situation in Japan is nowhere near as dangerous to human health as Chernobyl but that there are worrying similarities.



Dr Gale is a professor of haematology at the Imperial College London and he has just been in the Fukushima evacuation zone. He spoke to me a short time ago from Tokyo:



ROBERT GALE: Of course, the eruption of a nuclear power station and contamination of soil and water and air around it is serious. The question is just how serious. You know, is this another Chernobyl or is this another Three Mile Island or somewhere in between?



ELEANOR HALL: Well, you were part of the medical effort dealing with Chernobyl. How does this situation compare?



ROBERT GALE: Well, it's, you know, speaking for the moment because things can change rapidly but this is not another Chernobyl. In Chernobyl we had an uncontained reactor with a release of huge amounts of radioactive materials into the environment and ultimately all over the northern hemisphere.



Here we have contained reactors. We do have some spent fuel rods that are not contained and it is hard to imagine any situation in which you could ever get close to the health consequences of Chernobyl but I have to say that there are number of similarities. The complexity is certainly equal to Chernobyl in terms of trying to figure out how to contain the situation and how to mitigate the damage in the reactor.



In fact in some ways the Chernobyl situation was quite a bit simpler because the entire reactor was exposed and it was possible to bombard it and stop the emissions whereas here we are dealing with an intact structure and human beings have to get inside it and try to figure out what is going on.



ELEANOR HALL: Yes, to what extent are you concerned that the Japanese authorities still don't have the reactors under control and that they still can't isolate the source of this highly radioactive water?



ROBERT GALE: That is not entirely surprising. This is a really complicated situation. I have just come back from being up there. You know, when you have physical damage to these complex machines, ultimately you have to get human beings in there to see what is going on and to put it right and I think this thing won't be sorted out for some while. I mean it is not going to be sorted out in the next 24 or 48 hours because there is proper caution in exposing people to unacceptable levels of radiation.



ELEANOR HALL: So what sort of health dangers are likely? I mean presumably the workers are going to have the most severe effects but how many people in that area are likely to be affected and what sort of illnesses and effects will you see?



ROBERT GALE: The workers are uniquely at risk for the dangers of high-dose radiation. High dose radiation destroys the bone marrow so they are the only ones at risk from that kind of damage where we consider using intensive medical interventions but the rest of the population and them are at risk for essentially three things.



The most important one probably is cancer. There are the possibility of birth defects in children that are in the womb at the time of exposure and then there is the possibility of genetic abnormalities. We haven't seen the last two after the Chernobyl accident fortunately but we have seen cancers specifically thyroid cancers in young people.



There are about 6,000 cases of that. That was caused predominantly because young persons drank milk that was contaminated with radio iodine. That is a preventable situation. Withdrawing milk from the market, giving people a non-radioactive form of iodine that can, I would say, almost entirely, not entirely but almost entirely prevent thyroid cancers and those actions have been taken.



ELEANOR HALL: Now the Japanese government has banned the consumption of food and water from the Fukushima area. How long is the contamination of food and water there likely to last?



ROBERT GALE: If the emissions were stopped today, all of the radioactive iodine would be gone in about 80 days, if that is the problem then about three months from now the problem would be over but when we are dealing with caesium which is also released from nuclear reactors, we are talking about needing 300 years for that all to go away.



ELEANOR HALL: And do people know yet what isotopes they are dealing with?



ROBERT GALE: Well, I think the problem now is radio iodine. There is caesium being released but that is a much less of an issue so I would be reasonably optimistic at this moment that most of the area around these nuclear power stations could be reinhabited, you know, people could return to a normal life of growing food and things of that nature but containing this thing and getting it under control is not going to be a matter of weeks or even months. This is a long-term project that could take a year or two or perhaps even more.



ELEANOR HALL: And now radioactive isotopes are already leaking into the sea. The readings in the sea water spiked significantly in the last week. To what extent is that a concern for the population there that relies so heavily on seafood?



ROBERT GALE: You know, radioactivity getting anywhere is a concern so I don't want to in any way downplay it but if we have to have a radioactive release, the best place for it is in the sea because it is immediately diluted out and that offers the greatest protection to the population.



Now it will find its way into the food chain and so forth and so on but I think that is a relatively minor issue and it is in some ways fortunate that these depositions are occurring in the sea and not on land and now over populated areas.



ELEANOR HALL: You mentioned that this could go on for years. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is warning that the crisis will be long term. In medical terms, how dangerous is that? Is it more worrying the longer it goes on or is this at least better than a single catastrophic blast as happened with Chernobyl?



ROBERT GALE: That is a tough question. The Chernobyl accident was absolutely a worst case scenario but it was happened and it was over and once the sarcophagus could be constructed over the reactor, people could return to a sort of normal existence.



The problem that we face here in Japan is daily or even hourly reports of radionuclide levels in drinking water, in spinach and people are really dreadfully confused. They just don't know how to conduct their lives. Some people are, you now, sending their families overseas so in a public health and public information perspective, an ongoing disaster is far worse than a single event.



ELEANOR HALL: That is Dr Robert Gale, professor of haematology at the Imperial College London. He has just been in the Fukushima evacuation zone and you can listen to a longer version of that interview on our website.