You may think of a nuclear fallout zone as a no-go area, but a new study suggests it is ‘no worse than living in London.’
Research has found people who live in a contaminated area lose a few months of life expectancy and have more chance of developing cancer.
Scientists say a similar amount of damage is done to the health of people who live in polluted cities such as London.
The findings suggest that should a nuclear accident happen in the UK, few people would need to be relocated.
You may think of a nuclear fallout zone as being an extremely dangerous place to live, but a new study suggests that Londoners may already have experienced this lifestyle. Researchers have found that living in the UK capital poses the same health risks as a nuclear fallout zone
Researchers led by the University of Bristol looked at how many people would need to leave their homes after a big nuclear accident.
They created a simulation of a nuclear meltdown that balances costs and safety after a nuclear accident the size of Fukushima’s meltom at a fictional reactor in West Sussex.
They used Public Health England’s emergency plans for a nuclear disaster to predict the necessary precautions that would need to be taken.
Results showed that if a real disaster occured, the government would need to evacuate 44,000 temporarily from the area.
Approximately 360,000 people would be given anti-radiation tablets and 410,000 would be advised to stay indoors.
In the aftermath of the fictional meltdown, it was predicted that there would be 1,500 extra cases of cancer, of which a third would be fatal.
But the expected number of people needing to be relocated permanently was only 620.
And within three months of the accident, radiation levels would drop below ten millisieverts a year – less than people in the UK are exposed to naturally.
When this method was applied to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi incident, results suggested that it was difficult to justify relocating anyone from Fukushima Daiichi, despite the fact that 111,000 people were moved in 2011.
The researchers also applied the simulation to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.
Results suggested that people at risk of losing nine months life expectancy due to radiation would need to be moved – which equates to around 31,000 people would need to be moved.
In reality, 116,000 people were relocated after with accident, with a second relocation introduced by authorities in 1990.
And the researchers found the 900 people with the greatest radiation risk would have lost just three months’ life expectancy by staying.
Professor Philip Morris, an author of the study, said: ‘Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive.
‘But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be.
‘Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.’
For comparison, the researchers found that the average Londoner loses 4.5 months of life expectancy to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London.
Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London’s borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
The researchers created a method, called the J-value, that balances the costs and safety after a nuclear accident. They applied this to a fictional nuclear reactor on England’s South Downs. Results showed that if a real disaster occured, the government would only need to permanently relocate 620 people (stock image)
THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER
In 2011, a 10-metre-high tsunami that killed nearly 19,000 people crashed into Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.
This lead to several meltdowns, allowing harmful radioactive fuel rods and debris to escape from contained areas.
Six years after the disaster, researchers are still struggling to clean up fuel in the waters of the wasting reactors.
It’s estimated that plant officials have only located 10 per cent of the waste fuel left behind after the nuclear meltdowns.
And the damaged plant is believed to be leaking small amounts of the radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean, which could be travelling as far as the west cost of the US.
Researchers are now pinning their hopes on the remote-controlled sunfish robot to locate the lost fuel in order to work out the safest way to remove it.
An aerial view of the reactors of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant stand in Okuma, Fukushima