Greetings earthlings.

Three brief comments/reflections. Directed at no-one.

1) Based on data presented to METI by the power companies in 2010, Takano (Masao?) of Nagoya University argued in early summer 2011 (TV Asahi, Morning Bird) that Japan basically has enough electricity without nuclear plants:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxxWXHRQ7bw

2) For sociological 'risk' scholars, risk evaluations mean nothing if divorced from social context.
A perception of 'risk' indicates an underlying value judgement. For example, let's imagine we are in a pub and I kindly offer to spit in your beer. Would you accept? No? Why? Because it's 'disgusting'.
Now let's say I whip out a laptop and take you through a powerpoint presentation on how the risks of contracting an illness from alcohol consumption far outweigh the risks of contracting an illness from kissing. Now, may I spit in your beer? No? Why not?
Because spitting in your beer is still 'disgusting'. It violates a norm.

As has been observed, since 3.11 it appears that many people in Japan have come to view nuclear power and the web of complacent criminality that sustains it as, for want of a better word, 'disgusting'. Or 'anti-social'. There has been a normative shift. This affects risk appraisals. Whether the new set of risk appraisals can be said to be 'rational' or not is an open question. It depends on your values. I suppose the 'nuclear village' should have factored the predictable risk of a norm shift into its business model when choosing to skimp on safety....

Maybe we can say it is a return to the starting position of the immediate postwar.
The public was largely against nuclear weapons when details of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally came to light, and highly sceptical of nuclear power. It took a massive propaganda campaign from the mid 1950s under Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace Programme to generate support. This involved Nakasone Yasuhiro and Shoriki Matsutaro (Yomiuri Newspaper and Nihon TV). Shoriki was also a CIA asset, as revealed in 2006 by Arima Tetsuo (Waseda University).

3) It seems to me that we all need to be very careful when considering the possible health consequences of Fukushima (an ongoing catastrophe). The ICRP model is a Linear Non-Threshold model. This dictates that any increase in radiation represents a proportional increase in the risk of cancer, no matter what the level. (That's why your doctor will only x-ray you if absolutely necessary). Furthermore, according to the US National Academy of Science BEIR VII report, there is a proportional relationship to population. If 1000 people are exposed to 20mSV p.a. then 1 will die of cancer. If 10,000 people are exposed to 2mSV p.a. then 1 will die.
If 100,000 people are exposed to 0.2mSV p.a. then 1 will die. So how many people were exposed to how much radiation from Fukushima? No-one knows.

And, population is an issue because a small proportional increase represents a large absolute increase, as Yasutomi Ayumu (Tokyo University) has pointed out. As a rough example, Dr. Steve Wing (University of North Carolina) has shown that after Three Mile Island there was a 10% increase in cancers.
Well, around 30 million people live between Kanto and Fukushima. According to MEXT, on average 20% of Japanese people die from cancer (50% contract it). The NSC published this statistic on its homepage on 20th May 2011. Let's be generous and take the 20% figure (although that is mixing deaths from cancer with cancers). 20% of 30 million is 6 million. An excess cancer rate at 10% is 600,000 cancers. Even 1% is still 60,000. For me, only the individual can decide whether the increased risk is significant for them, and whether their having been exposed against their will is acceptable.

Already over 30% of 3765 Fukushima children tested had lumps or cysts in their throats. These are usually extremely rare in kids. Most deemed "benign" and so they are not being removed.

In addition, based on BEIR VII, Fairewinds (one of the few sources of reliable expert information) determines that at least 1 in every 100 young girls will develop cancer for every year they are exposed to 20 mSV of radiation, and 1 out of every 20 if exposed for 5 years. Girls are, for some reason, much more susceptible than adults.

http://fairewinds.com/content/cancer-risk-young-childre
n-near-fukushima-daiichi-underestimated

As they mention, this does not include internal exposure, the main problem for most people in Eastern Japan.
Dr. Jack Valentin, former Scientific Secretary of the ICRP, has admitted that the ICRP model is useless for internal exposure. Not much work has been done on it.
It seems that inhalation is more dangerous than ingestion, but no-one knows why. Possibly evolution.
Despite this, you still have lots of coverage of radiation levels based on Geiger counter readings. But Geiger counters don't pick up alpha and beta emitting hot particles, they only pick up gamma rays. All you can really say is that if levels are above normal background then, given the accident, there are probably a lot of hot particles around.

Radioactive fallout also causes more than just cancer.
Remember the heart problems in kids after Chernobyl.
And there have been anecdotal reports underneath the radar of unusual illnesses in Eastern Japan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNnZ6Lb_06s

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/08/20118
1665921711896.html

As an anecdote, I live in Tokyo. I know two kids who had a nosebleed in April 2011, and one who had a nosebleed in January 2012. I also have a friend who started having them this winter. He is in his early 40s and has never had nosebleeds before. Mean anything? I just don't know.

In short, nobody really knows. Least of all me. So, I'm with Nishio Masamichi, Director of the Hokkaido Cancer Centre, who stated that one should proceed on the basis of 'we don't know so we must assume that it is dangerous.'
I hope he is wrong, but am intrigued by how radioactive material normally deemed 'hazardous' suddenly becomes 'safe' whenever there is an accident at a nuclear plant.

Best Wishes,
Piers