The C word

There's been a lot of irresponsible coverage of the ongoing situation at Fukushima Daiichi in the media, with the C word being bandied about quite a bit.

John Beddington, the UK's chief scientific officer had this to say earlier (via The Guardian):

[Even] if you then couple that with the worst possible weather situation ie prevailing weather taking radioactive material in the direction of greater Tokyo and you had maybe rainfall which would bring the radioactive material down - do we have a problem? The answer is unequivocally no. Absolutely no issue. The problems are within 30km of the reactor.

And to give you a flavour for that, when Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core, material was going up not just 500m but to 30,000ft. It was lasting not for the odd hout or so but lasted months, and that was putting nuclear radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere for a very long period of time. But even in the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone that they had was about 30km. And in that exclusion zone, outside that, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate people had problems from the radiation. The problems with Chernobyl were people were continuing to drink the water, continuing to eat vegetables and so on and that was where the problems came from. That's not going to be the case here.

So what I would really re-emphasise is that this is very problematic for the area and the immediate vicinity and one has to have concerns for the people working there. Beyond that 20km or 30km, it's really not an issue for health.