Moscow, April 02: Japan’s unfolding nuclear disaster is “much bigger than Chernobyl” and could rewrite the international scale used to measure the severity of atomic accidents, a Russian expert says.
“Chernobyl was a dirty bomb explosion. The next dirty bomb is Fukushima and it will cost much more (in economic and human terms),” said Natalia Mironova, a thermodynamic engineer who became a leading anti-nuclear activist in Russia in the wake of the accident at the Soviet-built reactor in Ukraine in 1986.
“Fukushima is much bigger than Chernobyl,” she said on Friday, adding that the Japanese nuclear crisis was likely to eclipse Chernobyl on the seven-point international scale used to rate nuclear disasters.
Chernobyl, which a 2005 report by UN bodies including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called “the most severe in the history of the nuclear power industry”, was ranked a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).
But Japan’s ongoing crisis, triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami three weeks ago which took down the main electricity and back-up power supplies needed to power cooling systems at several reactors at Fukushima, could be “even higher” on the INES scale, said Mironova.
—Agencies