The Tepco company recognized that nearly 2,000 workers at the Fukushima plant were at increased risk of thyroid cancer. This is ten times more than the chffire announced in 2012.
Did the Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco) which operated the Fukushima plant have lied? The Japanese multinational admits to having underestimated the health risks linked to the nuclear accident of 2011, according to Le Monde this weekend.
A blian revised upwards
The Japanese operator recently carried out new health examinations on 19,592 of its workers, 3,290 employees of the firm and 16,302 employees of subcontracting companies. And the results reported largely revise the previous record upwards. A total of 1,973 workers had their thyroid exposed to cumulative doses of radiation greater than 100 millisieverts, or 10% of the people who worked on the site. A level beyond which an increased risk of developing cancer has been demonstrated by epidemiological studies.
And these corrected figures will undoubtedly revive the controversy over Tepco’s biased communication. In December 2012, the Japanese operator officially announced to the World Health Organization (WHO) that only 178 of its workers had undergone radiation exposure greater than 100 milliSieverts (mSv). At the time, the Japanese Ministry of Health had already openly criticized the evaluation criteria used by the company. The latter having noted errors in the calculation and interpretation of the results, had demanded an immediate reassessment of the cancer risk.
An increased risk already pointed out by the WHO
In March 2013, a study conducted for two years by WHO on estimated doses and their potential health effects devoted several pages to the specific case of emergency workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It is estimated that two-thirds have cancer risks similar to those of the general population, and one-third of them have an increased risk of 20%.
For these populations more at risk than others, the WHO underlined in its report that it will be necessary “to monitor in the long term the state of health of people exposed to a high risk while providing the necessary medical follow-up and support services. “.
These conclusions had already been strongly criticized at the time by the NGO Greenpeace, which considered that “the WHO report shamefully underestimates the impact of radiation”. The NGO considered that this report was “a political declaration to protect the nuclear industry” and not “scientific work focused on human health”.
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