As reported in morning spice headlines this morning, Japan has decided to raise its assessment of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale: from a level five to a level seven, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion in the former Soviet Union.

There have been critics within the nuclear industry pronouncing that the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, that caused the initial damage, may have also resulted in a large radioactive leak then.

At the time the Japanese were quick to denounce these claims and moved quickly with all kinds of containment procedures.

It is however important to note that Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is about equal to 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident.

Mr Nishiyama continued that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was different from Chernobyl in that an explosion had fanned the release of radioactive material during that crisis – and not at Fukushima Daiichi where all four reactors were still intact.

Tokyo Electric Power Company nevertheless confirmed the widely held belief that this is nowhere near over for Japan:

The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.

Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, spells it out in plain old English:

This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude.

The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.

Unlike the previous designation of the areas to be evacuated in respect to a radius expressed in miles or kilometres, the government has selected specific communities that should be evacuated now, further highlighting the seriousness of the situation.

The effects of this disaster will be felt for many years to come and the world really is going to need to look very seriously at the continued use of nuclear energy as a resource moving forward.

[Source: NYTimes]