Health risk in food from Chernobyl, Fukushima

The global environment watch-dog says people continue to eat and drink foods with dangerously high radiation levels. According to scientific tests conducted on its behalf, overall contamination from key isotopes such as caesium-137 and strontium-90 has fallen somewhat, but lingers, especially in places such as forests. 

People in affected areas are still coming into daily contact with dangerously high levels of radiation from the April, 1986 explosion at the nuclear plant that sent a plume of radioactive fallout across large swathes of Europe. 

“It is in what they eat and what they drink. It is in the wood they use for construction and burn to keep warm,” the Greenpeace report, entitled “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima”, says. The report found that in some cases, such as in grain, radiation levels in the contaminated areas, where an estimated 5 million people live, had actually increased. 

“And just as this contamination will be with them for decades to come, so will the related impacts on their health. Even those born 30 years after Chernobyl, still have to drink radioactively contaminated milk.” 

Greenpeace said it had also conducted tests in areas contaminated by the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan where an earthquake and tsunami damaged a nuclear plant and caused a substantial radiation leak covering a huge area. 

As with Chernobyl, “They will pose a risk to the population for decades or even centuries to come,” the report said.