Nuclear refugees after large early radioactive releases

However improbable, large early radioactive releases from a nuclear power plant would entail major consequences for the surrounding population. In Fukushima, 80,000 people had to evacuate the most contaminated areas around the NPP for a prolonged period of time. Had they remained where they lived, they would have received doses dangerous for their health in the long run. These people have been called “nuclear refugees”. The paper first argues that the number of nuclear refugees is a better measure of the severity of radiological consequences than the number of fatalities, although the latter is widely used to assess other catastrophic events such as earthquakes or tsunami. It is a valuable partial indicator in the context of comprehensive studies of overall consequences. Section 2 makes a clear distinction between long-term relocation and emergency evacuation and proposes a method to estimate the number of refugees. Section 3 examines the distribution of nuclear refugees with respect to weather and release site. The distribution is asymmetric and fat-tailed: unfavorable weather can lead to the contamination of large areas of land; large cities have in turn a higher chance of being contaminated. Variability with respect to site is quite intuitive; however, results show that simulations are far superior to an approach based on population living within 20 or 30 km around the site.