Bird’s Eye: As the Fukushima nuclear disaster continues to spread, it is wise to remember the words of Alexey Yablokov, adviser to President Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl: “When you hear ‘no immediate danger’ [from nuclear radiation] then you should run away as far and as fast as you can.” This week the Fukushima disaster was upgraded to the level of Chernobyl. We look at what that means, and what the real results of Chernobyl were. But we start with a must-read letter from a Vietnamese worker on the front lines.

* Letter from Fukushima: A Vietnamese-Japanese Police Officer’s Account

Editor’s note: This letter, written by a Vietnamese immigrant working in Fukishima as a policeman to a friend in Vietnam, has been circulating on Facebook among the Vietnamese diaspora. It is an extraordinary testimony to the strength and dignity of the Japanese spirit,  and an interesting slice of life near the epicenter of Japan’s current crisis, the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Brother,

How are you and your family? These last few days, everything was in chaos. When I close my eyes, I see dead bodies. When I open my eyes, I also see dead bodies. Each one of us must work 20 hours a day, yet I wish there were 48 hours in the day, so that we could continue helping and rescuing folks. We are without water and electricity, and food rations are near zero. We barely manage to move refugees before there are new orders to move them elsewhere….

* How Fukushima Is And Isn’t Like Chernobyl

This morning, the Japanese government officially upgraded Fukushima on theInternational Nuclear Events Scale to a 7, or “Major accident”. The new rating is the highest on the scale, and puts Fukushima on a par with the worst nuclear accident in history—Chernobyl. … But there are very important differences between Fukushima and Chernobyl. The biggest, in my mind at least, is the timescale over which the accident occurred. When Chernobyl’s reactor number 4 exploded in 1986, it scattered debris over a wide area and sent radioactive fallout high into the atmosphere. Entire villages near the reactor had to be evacuated in a matter of hours, and many residents had to leave personal effects behind. A fire burned at the site until 5 May, spewing tones of radioactive material over 200,000 square kilometres. By November, workers had successfully completed a concrete sarcophagus around the core, effectively sealing it off. In the short period following the explosion, the accident spewed some 14 million terabecquerels of radiation into the environment.

The Fukushima accident has unfolded much more slowly. The damaged reactors exploded over a period of days, and after a modest initial release, radiation has fallen off. So far, the reactors have spread about half-a-million terabecquerels into the air. I haven’t been able to find hard data on the first month after Chernobyl, but I’m willing to bet my lunch that it put out a lot more in that period. The problem is that Fukushima’s slow bleed of radiation is going to continue for a good period of time to come. Reactors are normally kept cool by recirculated water, but at Fukushima, the circulation system has been heavily damaged, and the only solution is to simply dump tons of water onto the cores. The water absorbs radioactive isotopes like caesium-137, and itself becomes a big waste problem. Moreover pictures from as recently as 10 April show steam continuing to rise from the reactors.

* Nuclear’s Green Cheerleaders Forget Chernobyl At Our Peril John Vidal The Guardian

While there have been thousands of east European studies into the health effects of radiation from Chernobyl, only a very few have been accepted by the UN, and there have been just a handful of international studies trying to gauge an overall figure. They range from the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation study (57 direct deaths and 4,000 cancers expected) to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), who estimated that more than 10,000 people had been affected by thyroid cancer alone and a further 50,000 cases could be expected.

Moving up the scale, a 2006 report for Green MEPs suggested up to 60,000 possible deaths; Greenpeace took the evidence of 52 scientists and estimated the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 140,000 more in time. Using other data, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences declared in 2006 that 212,000 people had died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl.

At the end of 2006, Yablokov and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devastated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organisation and the industry.

So who can we trust when the estimates swing so wildly? Should we believe the empirical evidence of the doctors; or governments and industrialists backed by their PR companies? So politicised has nuclear energy become, that you can now pick and choose your data, rubbish your opponents, and ignore anything you do not like.