What Light Upon What Fruit

The policies of population relocation put in train following the severe nuclear reactor accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 are examined using the Judgement- or J-value. Here relocation is taken to mean a movement of people that is long-term or permanent. A review is made of a 1992 IAEA/CEC study of the Chernobyl countermeasures, which includes data from which the effectiveness of the 1986 and post-1990 relocations may be judged using the J-value. The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit. ... Applying CLEARE, it was found that the average dose for the 900 people living in the most contaminated regions would have led to a loss of life expectancy of 3 months (89 days) if they had not been relocated in 1990. In the lowest band of the effective relocation area (555–740 kBq m−2), the average dose would have caused 19 days to be lost. The average dose for the 207,000 people in all areas with more than 555 kBq m−2 activity would have led to a loss of life expectancy of 24 days. Thus the person relocated in 1990 receiving the average dose will have achieved a gain in life expectancy of about 3½ weeks as a result of the decrease in radiation exposure achieved. These figures on reduction of life expectancy may be put into an initial context by noting that, according to Levchuk (2009), preventable alcohol-related deaths in Ukraine reduced male life expectancy by 5.2 years in 1995. Meanwhile the average Londoner currently loses 4.5 months of life through air pollution in the nation's capital (9 months loss of life expectancy at birth (Darzi, 2014)). ... Moreover there might be significant loss of life expectancy if the move led to reduced socio-economic status, which seems highly possible after a rapid relocation. A recent study based on data from the UK, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, USA and Australia has shown low socio-economic status to be associated with a 2.1 year reduction in life expectancy between ages 40 and 85 (Strigini et al., 2017). No such effect has been taken into account in the J-value analysis contained in this paper, but it is clear that a reduction of life expectancy of this order associated with relocation would strengthen considerably the argument against moving people away from their homes permanently. ... No radiation deaths occurred during or following the accident, however there were a number of deaths directly attributed to the relocation and subsequent relocation of the Fukushima population. Hasegawa et al. (2015) summarise that “After the accident, mortality among relocated elderly people needing nursing care increased by about three times in the first 3 months after relocation and remained about 1·5 times higher than before the accident.” The phenomenon of stress-related deaths after Fukushima has been examined in detail by Murakami et al. (2015) for the case of 3 nursing homes that were relocated. These deaths need to be taken into account when considering the impact of the response to the accident.