The headlines today include the extremely distressing news that officials in Japan have raised the severity level of the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant to 7, which is the highest level on the scale. Despite American media reports that say this makes Fukushima “as bad as Chernobyl”, other outlets are quick to add that the radiation levels at Fukushima are only one-tenth those that were measured at Chernobyl. However, there are some apples-to-oranges comparison problems involved, and some measures in the Fukushima area do, in fact, exceed measures from Pripyat. This BBC analyst tries to sort out the differences between the incidents and put the current crisis into proper perspective.
To help Americans grasp the context of the impact of the disaster, the German newspaper Die Zeit has put together an interactive map using Google Maps that shows the location of every operating nuclear power plant in the United States and allows users to map the extent of potential evacuation zones surrounding those plants similar to the one currently in place in Japan. The maps also show the size of the affected population of individual potential evacuation zones. Here’s a screenshot of the four nuclear plants in and around Massachusetts (one each in MA, NH, VT, and CT) with 19-mile evacuation zones:
(Slightly larger version here)
I highlighted the area around the Seabrook nuclear plant, which is the closest to me, and you can see that a 19-mile evacuation zone would affect over half a million people, ranging from Cape Ann and Lawrence in Massachusetts all the way to Durham and Dover, New Hampshire.
Time Magazine has this slideshow of pictures taken by photographer Athit Perawongmetha, who voluntarily went into the exclusion zone around Fukushima to document the situation. They are scenes of life instantly and probably permanently disrupted by the series of events of the last month — earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident.
Here, the body of a person killed by the tsunami lies in the open, still unrecovered by the authorities.
Many pets were, by necessity, abandoned and many will probably be left to die, despite efforts from animal rescue groups.
A school gymnasium being used as an evacuation center for earthquake/tsunami victims sits suddenly abandoned as people were forced to leave due to the radiation.
