It has been over six years since an unfortunate Tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster, disabling the power supply to the cooling system of three reactors that ultimately caused a melt down. Researchers have made lots of efforts to clean up the mess created by the meltdowns, but they have not yet achieved much success. It has only been a few months since a robot on a cleaning mission to the reactor got fried by intense radiation.
While the intense radiation was considered a major trouble for the nearby areas, the far-reaching consequences of the disaster were never quantified. The researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research have finally figured out the amount of radiation the planet was exposed to as a result of the accident.
According to the data compiled by the team, 80 percent of all the radiation that was released as the consequence of the reactor meltdown ended up in the ocean or the ice at the poles. Each human on earth received an extra 0.1 millisievert of the rest of the radiation that equates to “one extra X-ray each.”
The little radiation does not account to much when compared with the normal amount of radiation absorbed by everyone in a year which can go up to an average of 3.65 millisieverts. A CT scan alone exposes you to 15 millisieverts of radiation according to the NewScientist. You get radiation sickness only if the exposure goes to 1,000 millisieverts. These are the numbers for an average human living far enough from the disaster site, but for the unfortunate residents of the place, the scenario was not as lucky as this. Thousands of residents are already suffering from some sort of radiation related side-effect.
We hope that such incidents can be avoided in future with smart design and engineering ingenuity.