In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph there was a very interesting perspective on the Tōhoku earthquake disaster, almost a year on, from journalist Michael Hanlon in which he argues:

The world has forgotten the real victims of Fukushima
A natural disaster that cost the lives of thousands of people was
ignored in favour of a nuclear ‘disaster’ that never was

In the article Hanlon says, and I quote directly as I cannot say it with such conviction …

Most terrible of all, was the black wave, a tide of death which we saw apparently creeping over the landscape …

Hundreds, thousands of people were being killed before my eyes [and] like all journalists, I began writing about the disaster much as I had written about the 2004 earthquake and tsunamis which had devastated the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

But then something odd happened. When it became clear the waves had struck a nuclear power plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi … it was almost as if the great disaster we had witnessed had been erased from view. Suddenly, all the reports concentrated on the possibility of a reactor meltdown, the overheating fuel rods, and the design flaws in this ancient plant …

[A]round day three … I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story …

[N]ot only was the global media’s reaction to the Tohoku earthquake skewed in favour of a nuclear “disaster” that never was, but that this reporting had profound economic and even environmental implications …

[A]lthough outdated, riddled with design flaws and struck by geological forces that went way beyond the design brief, the Fukushima plant had survived remarkably intact.

There are bitter ironies in all of this … governments in Europe, including ours, were offering to fly expats home from places where the radiation levels were lower than the natural background count in Aberdeen or Cornwall.

As Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, says: “The reporting of Fukushima was guided by the Cold War reflex that matched radiation with fear and mortal danger. Reactors have been destroyed, but the radiation at Fukushima has caused no loss of life and is unlikely to do so, even in the next 50 years. The voices of science and common sense on which the future of mankind depends were drowned out and remain to be heard, even today. The result has been unnecessary suffering and great socio-economic damage.” …

[P]olicymakers should have waited until at least some science was in before cancelling programmes which, in the case of Germany, will lead to some 70 million metric tonnes annually of increased CO2 emissions, because the shortfall will almost certainly be met by coal-fired power. Nobody, to date, has died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Zero — a number you will have read even less about than the 20,000 dead.

Yes, OK, I’m guilty as well. But then as a scientist I was at least concerned to try to keep the nuclear problems in perspective — as my posts over the months will testify. Nonetheless there has been a humanitarian disaster which we have all quietly forgotten. Shame on us!