I wonder, maybe someone can answer: why is Chernobyl still remembered while nobody talks about Fukushima anymore?
In terms of "nuclear disaster", Chernobyl was also several orders of magnitude bigger.
Fukushima was the product of a HUGE natural disaster (an earthquake and tsunami) that killed 15K people, and the effect of nuclear power plant problem has been pretty limited compared with that. Chernobyl was solely a problem on the power plant that produced everything, including actual deaths by radiation, the permanent evacuation of a whole town, involvement of a lot of workers that received quite high radiation levels, and a measurable lasting effect on the surroundings. It also was pretty close to be a much bigger problem.
They are both very very important nuclear incidents which should be taken seriously. And they are remembered because of that. Chernobyl, though, was much more dangerous and uncontrolled.
In the big scheme of things, they are dwarfed in impact for huge natural disasters like Haiti's earthquake in 2010 or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Nuclear power and radiation has this especial meaning for us that makes us fear it more than other things.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_dis...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas...
As usual with long-term exposure, cause of death becomes a statistical and actuarial question.
Incidentally, Chernobyl almost sterilised large areas of Europe and Russia. One of the official documentaries explains what would have happened if the initial suicide squad efforts had failed - it would have been far worse than anything in history.
By contrast, Chernobyl killed somewhere around 20,000 people (also assuming linear no-threshold).
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...
I worry about people who live in Koriyama which is a great city but there is obviously a heightened risk now. For those who can't move their families, the radioactive isotopes of cesium and what was iodine in the initial exposure obviously could cause cancer or other diseases. Especially in children, which makes me sad.
It's not something I talk about because there is little benefit to prevention at this point and really more negativity surrounding those who try to use it in journalism to shock people or create unnecessary panic. In some ways I might not have a scientific view of the disaster, but studying at a university in the region in May of that year, I did have access to regular reports of the radiation level and I did do some amateur investigating.
I don't believe anyone who says California is or was at risk from the radiation has any right saying that.
I also believe that, in the long term, many of the areas surrounding the disaster in northeastern Japan are safe and that tourism in the region has been impacted disproportionately to the risk.
I know that it's a complicated issue and that mistakes have been made, labeling food that's been grown in Fukushima, or failing to set up a proper evacuation zone initially, but all in all it's a real place where people are still living, and most of the attention Fukushima has gotten in the US has been really misplaced, in that there hasn't been sympathy and there's been a fearful response.