I keep forgetting it’s all about money, and science doesn’t really matter. At all. Really.
This week, Leslie Corrice, former nuclear operations engineer and now author and webmaster, brought to my attention the rather stunning payouts to families evacuated from the Fukushima region as a result of the disaster (Hiroshima Syndrome).
According to the Japanese Science and Environment Ministry (Asahi), about 84,000 refugees are being, or will be, paid stipends from Tepco as a result of being evacuated. An average family of four will receive between about $400,000 (40 million yen) and about $900,000 (90 million yen), depending upon where they lived within the evacuation zone.*(see Note below). This is not a single payout, but will continue each year that the family members are refugees.
This is quite a lot of money, unheard of in the annals of disasters around the world, even in the U.S. and Europe. For those from the highest level evacuation zone (> 50 mSv/year), Tepco’s average payout breaks down as:
- $417,000 for real estate compensation,
- $180,000 in lost wages and possessions, and
- $300,000 for pain and suffering, including psychological distress.
This is many, many, many times more than any tsunami refugees are getting from the government (< $30,000/year), and their lives were actually destroyed. Over 20,000 of them lost their lives. No one died from Fukushima radiation itself, or ever will. No one in Japan or anywhere else will get cancer because of Fukushima. So why is the compensation so different?
I don’t want to trivialize the burden of those who were affected by the disaster. Their pain and suffering is real. But it is being pushed to ridiculous levels by politically-motivated anti-nukes and unethical politicians like the former Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
Kan needed to distract the public from his inability to help the more numerous tsunami victims. He refused to abide by international standards of evacuation and fallout geometry, unnecessarily making over twice the number of people refugees from the region around Fukushima. He then pushed to constantly lower the radiation exposure limits to returning home, from the reasonable and internationally-accepted 20 mSv/year to 1 mSv/year. By this criteria, almost no one in America could return home from work tomorrow.
Finally, Kan used the country’s inherent fear of radiation to push through the Fukushima compensation act that led to these high levels of compensation, and also made Tepco pay. He also convinced everyone that the Fukushima disaster was not a natural disaster, even though it was caused by a tsunami, thus requiring compensation from the company to those effected.
In the end, it didn’t work for Kan, and he was ousted from office. But his mishandling of the situation has resulted in the Japanese public’s complete distrust of scientists and the government, and will lead to the disaster lasting much longer than it should. It remains to be seen how this payout strategy works, or if it can be sustained for very long.
The Fukushima refugees are not being served psychologically or emotionally by these huge payouts, and the public is being misled since they think these payments are because these people have been harmed by radiation. They haven’t been harmed by radiation. And they won't ever be, even if the are allowed to go home to all but the most contaminated areas near the reactors.
The payouts are also making it difficult for the people, the region and the country to actually recover and get the region back to some semblance of normal.
And who is paying these monies anyway? Since no company like Tepco could afford to pay out these amounts, much of it is coming from the Japanese government to Tepco, from something called the Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund (Tepco release). Tepco is expected to pay it back eventually, although talk of nationalizing the company would make that unlikely.
The Science and Environment Ministry said they will consider extending the period of payouts beyond a few years if social infrastructure and employment opportunities are considered insufficient. In addition, a further statute extension is possible if psychological suffering continues unabated.
Of course psychological suffering will continue unabated, since no one will tell these people they’re not going to die from radiation.
*Note Feb 10, 2014 - since this post, a cognizant reader noted that the Japanese government is proposing a much more modest compensation plan, between $96,820 and $135,548
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201312100062
