‘Fukushima disaster worse than Chernobyl’ 04/03/2011

‘Fukushima disaster worse than Chernobyl’

04/03/2011
WASHINGTON — 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 yesterday said.

“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, adding the Japanese nuclear crisis was likely to eclipse Chernobyl on the seven-point scale used to rate nuclear disasters.

A 2005 report by UN bodies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), called Chernobyl “the most severe in the history of the nuclear power industry” and ranked it a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES)..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110403hed5.html