Although he initially viewed the study as nothing more than nonsense, ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom was dismayed to discover wide media pickup of a reckless report claiming that, somehow, 14,000 Americans had died as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident last March in Japan. So, in an op-ed posted yesterday on Forbes.com, he debunks the study authors bizarre claims.
First, Dr. Bloom argues, if such radiation were to cause any deaths, it would theoretically do so by either causing cancer or through radiation poisoning. But cancer takes years to develop, and even longer to kill. So the assumption that any cancer deaths occurring within just a few months of the accident were caused by radiation is scientifically baseless. Furthermore, radiation poisoning would require levels of exposure many times greater than what could possibly have reached the U.S. And there should have been some geographical pattern to the excess deaths that the researchers observed but there was nothing of the sort.
As Dr. Bloom concludes:
Read the op-ed in its entirety here.