Everybody who gets cancer in Japan over the next 40 years will no doubt blame their misfortune on radiation from Fukushima Daiichi. This will probably be the case for many other diseases too, ranging from heart failure to nose bleeds—as happened after the catastrophic explosion in 1986 at Chernobyl, a Soviet nuclear power station in Ukraine. This would be entirely understandable but will have no basis in science.
On April 12, 2011, a month after the tsunami struck, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency announced that it was raising the grading of the Fukushima Daiichi event from five to seven—the highest level on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). This helped to create the misleading impression that the event was as bad as Chernobyl, and has since been exploited in anti-nuclear propaganda despite the fact that there is no possibility that the physical health consequences of Fukushima Daiichi will be anywhere near as bad as those of Chernobyl.
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