Of course, we are not saying nothing should be done, quite the opposite.

It’s difficult to argue for any relocation after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, where the calculated loss of life expectancy from staying put in the worst-affected township, Tomioka, would have been three months – less than Londoners are currently losing to air pollution That means hundreds of people relocated, rather than tens of thousands. Our team ran a simulation of a Fukushima-style accident at a fictional reactor in southern England and showed that, most likely, only the people in the nearest village would need to move out. In fact, because power plants are generally built some distance from towns and cities, very few of even the most severe nuclear accidents would warrant long-term population relocations. Japan probably didn’t need to relocate anyone, and the evacuations after Chernobyl involved five to ten times too many people.

Could we, by examining the evidence, come up with better policy prescriptions than the emerging playbook deployed in Ukraine and Japan? Together with colleagues at the universities of Manchester and Warwick, we used research methods from statistics, meteorology, reactor physics, radiation science and economics and arrived at a surprising conclusion. We set out to determine how best to respond to a severe nuclear accident using a science-led approach. Namie, a town of 21,000 people, one month on from the nuclear disaster. A total of 109,000 people were ordered to leave their homes, with a further 45,000 choosing to evacuate from places nearby, which added to the turmoil. While Japan was reeling from the natural disaster, the authorities imposed an evacuation order with a radius of 20km around the stricken nuclear plant. There, authorities evacuated the local population and have kept them away for decades, which was hugely expensive and disruptive for the communities involved. How should a government react when confronted by clear evidence of radioactive material being released into the environment? A precedent was set 25 years before, at Chernobyl in Ukraine. In order to minimise suffering in future nuclear accidents, there are important lessons from March 2011 that must be learned. While no-one died from the radiation after the radiation accident at Fukushima Daiichi, roughly two thousand elderly people died prematurely as a result of their enforced evacuation and undoubtedly many more of the huge number of displaced people experienced distress. But the distinction hardly mattered – something had clearly gone terribly wrong.Ī decade on from the tragedy, many people are still mourning the nearly 16,000 people who lost their lives to the tsunami. The blast wasn’t actually nuclear, it was the result of hot hydrogen gas encountering the cool, outside air during the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The world saw something never before caught on camera on March 12, 2011: an explosion ripping the roof off a nuclear power plant – Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. The Open University and University of Bristol provide funding as founding partners of The Conversation UK. The author acknowledges the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant reference number EP/K007580/1. The work reported on was carried out as part of the NREFS project, Management of Nuclear Risk Issues: Environmental, Financial and Safety, led by Philip Thomas while he was at City, University of London and then the University of Bristol, and carried out in collaboration with Manchester, Warwick and Open Universities and with the support of the Atomic Energy Commission of India as part of the UK-India Civil Nuclear Power Collaboration. Philip Thomas is professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and director of Michaelmas Consulting Ltd. He was a Co-Investigator for the NREFS project (Management of Nuclear Risk Issues: Environmental, Financial and Safety) and project lead at The Open University. William Nuttall received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK under grant reference number EP/K007580/1. Professor of Risk Management, University of Bristol

Nuclear reactor meltdown fukushima