We cannot always agree to disagree. Not in an argument of this nature. Not when the truth is hidden behind smoke and mirrors.
In the wake of the historic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in March, experts have debated whether radiation poisoning could be a potential hazard to Americans living on the West Coast. More often than not, those debates have left Americans under a cloud of ambiguity.
In November, Dr. Marco Kaltofen, a civil and environmental engineer at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said radiation does in fact pose a health risk to Americans living near the Pacific Ocean.
“The Fukushima nuclear accident dispersed airborne dusts that are contaminated with radioactive particles,” Kaltofen said during a presentation at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “When inhaled or ingested, these particles can have negative effects on human health that are different from those caused by exposure to external or uniform radiation fields.”
Jeffrey Stehr, an assistant research scientist at this university, and several of his colleagues in the university’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science designed a weather model to map the possible trajectory of radiation after the disaster and interpreted a different analysis.
“The amounts of radiation that I’ve seen have all been either well below or comparable to natural background radiation,” Stehr said.
The team, unfunded and working entirely in their spare time, set up worst case scenario models and used public resources to predict the radiation’s impact — where it would go and what could possibly be coming behind it.
According to Stehr, the results he collected were clear.
“We were able to calculate how much [radiation] would disperse with time,” Stehr said. “We said, ‘What if none of it got rained out? What if all it did was spread out?’ Our conclusion was that it wasn’t all that big of a deal even if it came straight across [the ocean].”
Portland, Ore. native Connor Letourneau said much of the back and forth rhetoric has led to a lack of fear in those who are potentially facing the highest risk.
“I know now it’s not even a topic of conversation [back home], especially since some people believe it won’t be as bad as they originally thought,” Letourneau, a junior journalism major said.
Tyson Slocum, director of the Public Citizen’s Energy Program, believes deficiencies in communication have led to the quagmire.
“I think the lack of forthright information from U.S. and Japanese authorities has been persistent,” Slocum said. “It is clear that officials prioritized emphasizing public calm rather than giving people full information.”
Stehr echoed Slocum’s sentiments, but stopped short of calling out American officials as the lone culprit.
“I don’t know that anything coming out of Washington is anything more than what is coming out of Japan,” Stehr said. “We are in a position where you really don’t know. You are relatively close by and there is an impression in Japan that people are not necessarily telling you the truth; it’s a pretty sticky situation.”
Junior journalism major Pete Volk, a native of North Hollywood, Calif., is worried that the fear created may be causing more harm than the actual mystery.
“People are frightened because it’s just kind of like an unknown,” Volk said. “It could cause a lot of harm, not only to people individually, but just on a larger scale with the wildlife.”
Volk added that a lot of California’s economy, specifically near the San Francisco Bay, thrives on the environment.
Perhaps the most effective way to settle the argument and create a sense of clarity among all parties is to focus less on what officials are saying and invest more resources into an unregulated examination that could put an end the “he said-she said” narrative.
“I think we need a thorough independent scientific analysis of radiation exposure both around the Fukushima facilities and the potential permeation into the West Coast — particularly into food supplies and other agriculture commodities,” Slocum said.
Although Letourneau attends college in Maryland, he is aware of the potential dangers back home, if indeed radiation penetrates into the atmosphere.
“When [this debate] first started, it sounded like doomsday and even WWII all over again,” Letourneau said. “We heard that the people who were left would die extremely young or that babies would be deformed. Right now, I don’t know what to think.”
