Five Years Later, Cutting Through the Fukushima Myths
At the site of the earthquake, stress had been building up in the Earth’s crust for decades. When it released, that stress caused one of the most damaging quakes on record. The earth moved more than 20 meters over a 500-mile zone and the resulting earthquake released as much energy as a 45-megaton hydrogen bomb (to put this in perspective, this is 30,000 times more powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima). It was the fourth-strongest earthquake recorded since 1900 and the strongest earthquake to strike Japan in recorded history. The quake shifted the Earth’s axis by somewhere between 4 and 10 inches ..
.. For example, it’s true that radioactive cesium (Cs-134 and Cs-137) was measured in tuna caught in the Pacific Ocean. But it’s not true that this cesium posed any risk to people eating this tuna. I interviewed the scientist who made these measurements and he pointed out that the radioactivity of the cesium was lower than the radioactivity content of the natural potassium in the fish.
.. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has studied the impact of the Chernobyl accident. While there was significant short-term impact in the areas close to the Chernobyl reactors—and the area right around the ruined reactor remains a forbidden zone where you just don’t want to go—further afield the impact was fairly low. Numerous studies (summarized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in this 2006 report) concluded that the ecosystem in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl site is among the richest ecosystems in Europe, teeming with large game as well as smaller animals, partly because there aren’t any people there.