Chris Busby, a professor at the University of Ulster known for his alarmist views, generated controversy during a Japan visit last month when he said the disaster would result in more than 1 million deaths. "Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan," he said. "Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse."
Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters. One of the most prominent of them is Dr Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician and long time anti-nuclear activist who warns of "horrors to come" in Fukushima.
On the other side of the nuclear fence are the industry friendly (PAID) scientists who insist that the crisis is under control and radiation levels are mostly safe. "I believe the government and Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco, the plant's operator] are doing their best," said Naoto Sekimura, vice-dean of the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Mr Sekimura initially advised residents near the plant that a radioactive disaster was "unlikely" and that they should stay "calm", an assessment he has since had to reverse.
NOTE: It doesn't take any serious math to rough guess how much worse:
Chernobyl 3 months old and no fuel rod storage
1 Reactor that burned only 10 days
1 million deaths according to scientists in 25 years
roughly 100,000 deaths, over 25 years, for every day it burned
Fukushima 40 years old & enormous piles of stored reactors
3 Melt through reactors
still burning almost 180 days later
The math is too awful to contemplate, isn't it?
Could it be at least 3 times as bad as Chernobyl or 300,000 deaths per day, over 25 years, for every day it burns?
That would be 54 million, and growing daily.
Yet even Hiroshima had survivors.
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