Link: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Time-to-look-again-at-radiation-safety1103161.html
Time to look again at radiation safety 11 March 2016 Five years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi, the scientific community is ready to assess what the real health consequences have been and put them into perspective with other risks in our lives, Gerry Thomas says. Speaking on the Today program on the fifth anniversary of the accident, Thomas, who is head of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College London, said, "It's a common misconception that nuclear accidents from power stations cause high doses of radiation to individuals but in actual fact they are a lot lower than people think. And people tend to equate nuclear power plants with the atomic bomb and the two are very different things." "We were brought up to believe that the next atomic weapon that went off would probably finish our species on the planet," she continued, "and we seem to have confused the two in our minds and therefore find it very difficult to move on from there." "And I think also we didn't really know the effects of nuclear power accidents until we've had sufficient time after they've happened to really look at the results and we're there now with Chernobyl, we're 30 years past the accident, it's the 30th anniversary this year. And so we've got adequate amounts of data to look at and say, 'it's not that same as an atomic weapon and we can now prove that." The key difference, she said, is that nuclear weapons produce huge amounts of penetrating gamma radiation, whereas a reactor accident produces isotopic radiation from caesium-137 and iodine-131 that can only cause harm if taken into the body. So despite the large release of the Fukushima accident and the wide area it affected, said Thomas, "in actual fact the doses that were around Fukushima have been calculated to be around 1 milliSievert to 95% of the population - that's a tenth of a CT scan, that's all."