Learning from Chernobyl (NHK video)

January 22, 2014

Nuclear Watch: Learning from Chernobyl

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/newsline/201401240500.html 

Chernobyl has been decommissioning for 3 decades and the whole process could last 100 years.

The Japanese Gov’t has sent a team of Japanese (Pr. Okazaki) to see how crews there are protected from radiation.

The workers at the plant are checked regularly for more than 200 diseases (also focus on the eyes since this is where the effects of radiation usually appear first) and the data is collected by a central institution which enables doctors to quickly spot any abnormality and act upon it.

The situation at Fukushima is very different: the health screening  are left to the contractors and they are not obliged to submit data to the operator or to any national institution.

Pr. Okazaki thinks Japan has a lot to learn from what happened at Chernobyl and he would like to see a centralized system to collect all the data regarding workers’ health. He will submit his findings  to the Japanese Gov't soon.