The situation is deteriorating again. Just as we thought things were slowly getting under control, the radioactivity have soared to the unprecedented level of 1000 millisieverts per hour, i.e. 10 million times the usual level. This means that up to 5 percent of the workers at the plant will die within a month by staying one hour on the spot, 50 percent won't survive an exposure of more than 2 hours, and nobody could survive 8 hours of radiation at that level and would succumb in a matter of hours.
In comparison, the criterion for relocation after Chernobyl was 350 millisieverts in one's lifetime, the dose received by workers at Fukushima in only 20 minutes.
This all is extremely worrying. Yesterday we learned that the sea along the Pacific coast of Japan was 1,250 times more radioactive than normal. In my opinion, this news is worse than the forced evacuation of the Fukushima prefecture because Japanese diet is highly dependent on fish and seafood from its Pacific coast (one of the richest region for fishing in the world). I foresee that thousands of fish shops and restaurants will go bankrupt in the coming months due to justifiable fears about radioactive fish. Fish and seafood go well beyond sushi in Japanese cuisine. It isn't by chance than the Tsukiji is the world's largest fish market. Knowing that there are over 200,000 restaurants in Tokyo, this would be a heavy blow to the Japanese economy, notwithstanding the fact that the price of meat will skyrocket to compensate for fish and seafood.
The economic consequences of prolonged radioactive fisheries might be as serious as the cost of the tsunami itself. Today's announcement that radiations were now 125 times higher than on 15 March (the day after the meltdown started) is bad omen for the long-term radioactivity in the sea (another good reason never to locate a nuclear plant by the sea !). Agricultural products from the Fukushima prefecture are already compromised for many years, if not decades.
But the first concern for many Japanese in the region of Tokyo and Sendai at the moment will be about their own safety. The USA recommended an evacuation zone in a radius of 80 km (which is less than Chernobyl). It would make sense to extend this radius in consideration of the escalating radioactivity. Chernobyl had an evacuation radius ranging from 100 to 400 km and children are still born with terrible malformations nowadays, 25 years later, in spite of that. It clearly wasn't enough. Back then, the USSR had decided that the evacuation zone stopped just before Kiev and Minsk. This was obviously an easy way of not having to relocate millions of people. It is exactly the approach taken by the Japanese authorities at present.
The Japanese government will always prefer to "sacrifice" part of its population to diseases on the long run rather than cause an immediate panic and costly mass relocation. Their logic, in the long tradition of Japanese politicians, is that the people in office now won't have to deal with the medical consequences on the population in 10 or 20 years' time, because they will most likely have retired by then. This approach has been consistently adopted by post-war Japanese politicians for every single kind of problem the country has faced, from ecological disasters (like Minamata) to economic plight. This is why I personally wouldn't stay in Sendai and couldn't be truthful by telling people the area is still safe.
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