A Japanese appeals court has rejected a lawsuit filed by parents of children from Koriyama, a city located about 40 miles west of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, that argued the government is legally responsible for evacuating students at elementary and junior-high schools due to fallout from the March 2011 disaster. The lawsuit maintained that the kids, who are more vulnerable to radiation than adults, should be moved to areas where exposure would be no higher than natural background levels, which average about 1.5 millisieverts in Japan. The court acknowledged that radiation in Koriyama is higher than levels deemed safe before the Fukushima meltdowns, but said the city has no responsibility to help move the children who are required to attend school there. In other words, if you want to leave, good luck to you.
After the Fukushima catastrophe, the Japanese central government set an annual exposure limit of 20 millisieverts for determining whether people should be evacuated from where they live. The average in Koriyama is below this figure, but there are many “hot spots” above it. Testing remains ad hoc, as shown recently via the discovery by the Citizen’s Radioactivity Measuring Station–a non-government group–of very high cesium levels in school swimming pools in nearby Fukushima city. A lower court threw out the lawsuit in December 2011, saying exposure had not reached a 100 millisievert threshold that government officials and a doctor in charge of health safety in Fukushima have cited as a cutoff for health effects. That the world’s major scientific organizations, including the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the U.S. National Academies of Science, have stated for years that there is no such threshold was ignored by the court.
The case demonstrates the ongoing politicization of the subject of low-dose, long-term exposure to radiation, despite wide scientific consensus. The source of the supposed 100 millisievert “threshold” is the study of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. Sixty-five percent of them received a dose of radiation less than this number, which is used by scientists to define “low dose.” According to the National Academies’ BEIR VII report on health risks from low levels of ionizing radiation, at dose levels of about 100 to 4000 mSv, excess cancers have been found in the survivors. (In the case of exposures to fetuses during pregnancy, excess cancers can be detected at doses as low as 10 mSv.) At doses below 100 mSv, “statistical limitations make it difficult to evaluate cancer risk in humans,” the BEIR VII report says, but “the risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold” (emphasis mine). That is, there simply is no cutoff–“the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” This is the risk that the court has deemed acceptable for the children of Koriyama.
The court’s action speaks of a government that is still overwhelmed by the disaster and erecting barricades.
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