The Biggest Environmental Disaster of the Decade

Here is a cautionary tale about the risk of downplaying the importance of environmental health.

A year ago, Fukushima City was a bustling city with a population of 290,000.  Its people were going about their business the day the earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, triggering the biggest environmental disaster most will ever experience.

At first, the trains stopped running because of damage to the railways, and most of the city’s water stopped running because of ruptures in water mains.

Over the next several days, a silent toxin began to spread along with word of the natural disaster.  The Fukushima nuclear power plants, 39 miles southeast of the city, began melting down, releasing radioactive particles into the air and water. 

Although Fukushima remained outside the quarantined evacuation zone stretching twelve miles out from the nuclear facility, waves of radioactive cesium dust escaped the zone, flying on the winds toward the city.  As it rained and snowed, the cesium dust fell to the ground, infiltrating homes and businesses, hospitals and markets, roadways and parks. 

A year later, the Fukushima government is still trying to save people’s homes by cleaning up a deadly environmental mess.

If you have ever experienced a home construction or renovation project, you have an idea of what environmental health officials are facing.  When you tear down a wall, sheetrock dust collects everywhere and sticks to everything – furniture and floors, wall hangings, clothes, and even inside cupboards and cabinets.  To clean it, you have to wipe down everything individually.  And what you don’t catch goes back into the air, eventually needing to be cleaned up again.

Now imagine that this dust were completely invisible and radioactive, and both indoors and outdoors.  That’s what the people of Fukushima have to clean.  Building by building and property by property, they go about their task.  They can’t just wash the cesium down the drain.  They have to dig out the top two inches of their landscapes, and cart away the vegetation and dirt as radioactive waste, or create mini nuclear waste dumps by burying everything contaminated in deep holes in their own backyards.    

If just one property owner refuses, then as it rains again, the entire neighborhood can be re-contaminated.

We should all know by now that Fukushima’s story today could be Hartford’s, Miami’s, or West Palm Beach’s tomorrow.  Hartford is just 40 miles from the Millstone nuclear plants, Miami is 25 miles from the Turkey Point nuclear plants, and West Palm Beach is 40 miles from the Jensen Beach nuclear plants.

If a Fukushima-level event hit near me or my family, I’d want a strong Health Department with a clear environmental health mandate ready to respond. 

But that’s not what people in Florida are getting.

Last week, Florida’s State Legislature passed a law eliminating the Division of Environmental Health from the State Health Department.  It also eliminated the Community Environmental Health and Healthy Communities, Healthy People programs.  The Florida Public Health Association and others fought valiantly against these changes.

Not only did the legislature eliminate the Division of Environmental Health, it removed from the Health Department’s duties in section 381.0011 of the Florida statutes the power to quarantine “premises as the circumstances indicate for… providing protection from unsafe conditions that pose a threat to public health.”

Faced with a Fukushima-level event, radioactive or otherwise, the Florida Health Department will no longer have the independent power to create an evacuation zone to protect the public health.

The legislature did give some quarantine responsibility back to the Department as an amendment to section 381.00315 of the Florida Statutes.  But in that section, the Department’s authority is severely restricted.  It must consult with any agency that might be affected, its quarantine order is limited to sixty days, and violations of the order are punishable by as little as a $500 fine.

In other words, if the Fukushima meltdown had happened in South Florida, any general quarantine orders related to Miami would have expired ten months ago, and the only penalty for repeated re-contamination of a neighbor’s property might be a $500 fine.

Political leaders often embrace nuclear energy and many other industrial contaminants, in spite of the risks and costs.  These risks may not bother them, but at the very least they could give the rest of us a modicum of protection.

Otherwise, the biggest environment disaster of the decade may not be the one we witnessed in Japan.  It could be the one that just played out in the Florida legislature.

If you have questions about this column or wish to receive an email notifying you when new Our Health Policy Matters columns are published, please email gionfriddopaul@gmail.com.

The Nuclear Nightmare in Japan

The catastrophic nightmare in Japan could happen anywhere.  It is a reminder of the fragile relationship between our environment and our health.

As the tsunami waves swept over the land, they swept away any pretense that we are more powerful than our environment.  The mere shifting by several feet of two constantly moving plates of the earth resulted in the death of thousands, the destruction of a region, and catastrophic worldwide effects.

Experts have noted that as many as 24% of premature deaths can be attributed to environmental factors.  These result from our inadequate understanding of our environment, and/or our inability to manage its forces.

While the underdeveloped world is more susceptible, the Japanese tsunami reminds us that the overdeveloped world is not immune.   

The images are more powerful than their descriptions.  In the wake of such destruction, we can see -- as we do in the aftermath of hurricanes -- the breeding grounds for disease.  We know that many of the survivors of the initial devastation will still become its victims. 

There are clear psychological effects as well.  In a matter of minutes, the lives of the shocked and stunned people of northeast Japan were changed forever.  Up to 15% of children who survived the tsunami, twice the norm for adults, will likely be diagnosed with PTSD.

Still greater effects are hidden in what we can’t see.

The partial meltdowns of multiple nuclear reactors are resulting in the release of deadly radiation into the atmosphere that will compromise human health for decades. 

Our leaders have forgotten how dangerous nuclear power can be.  Even some who consider themselves environmentalists naively believe that we “harnessed” the atom and made nuclear energy “green.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear energy was promoted as “safe, clean, and cheap” by the brand-new nuclear industry.  It was said that it was safer than walking across the street and would be too cheap to meter.  School children toured nuclear power plants to learn about the “peaceful atom.” 

Our government knew better.  In 1957, it passed the Price-Anderson Act, limiting the liability of nuclear plant owners in the event of a nuclear accident.  This is still the law of the land.  Without it, not a single nuclear power plant would have been commercially viable in this country. 

Each reactor owner must carry only $375 million of insurance to pay for damages from an accident; up to $12.6 billion more is in a secondary insurance pool.  If you lost your home to nuclear contamination, your homeowners insurance would pay nothing.

To put this in perspective, the total cost resulting from the Japanese quake and tsunami is already estimated to be up to $60 billion, and Hurricane Katrina did even more damage than this.  The Chernobyl accident cost Ukraine alone an estimated $201 billion.  The total compensation for a nuclear accident in this country could be as little as five cents on the dollar.

Once their liability was limited, nuclear companies were free to put their plants anywhere – near population centers and even along earthquake fault lines.

After many “minor” incidents in the United States and around the world during the 1960s and 1970s, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 proved once and for all that the safety systems in nuclear power plants did not work as advertised.    

Then came Chernobyl in 1986.  This was the defining civilian nuclear disaster of the 20^th century.  Twenty-five years later, experts are still tallying its effects.  The World Health Organization conservatively estimates the number of deaths at nearly 10,000, plus thousands more excess cancers, and other health and mental health effects. 

A YouTube video shows how radiation would spread into the atmosphere if a Chernobyl-like accident were to happen in the United States.  It is a frightening reminder of the risks we are taking.

There is a lot we don’t yet know as the fuel rods melt down and the crisis unfolds in Japan.  One thing is certain.  It will be years before we understand the full global effect on human life from this event. 

We can all put those years to good use if we finally take to heart the lessons from this unspeakable tragedy.  We cannot overcome the limitations of our planet.  We do not control the forces of nature.  We can choose, however, not to stand in harm’s way. 

There are 104 operating nuclear reactors in the United States today.  Just as in Japan, some are built near earthquake fault lines and most are close to cities. 

Any one of them could be a time bomb.  It’s time we lived a little greener, and not supply so much fuel for the next environmental health disaster.

We can pretend that what’s happening in Japan is just someone else’s nightmare, or we can wake up and start doing something about it.