Around 2,000 people who have worked at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant face a heightened risk of thyroid cancer, its operator said on Friday.
Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said 1,973 people – around 10 per cent of those employed in emergency crews involved in the clean-up since the meltdowns – were believed to have been exposed to enough radiation to cause potential problems.
The figure is a 10-fold increase on Tepco’s previous estimate of the number of possible thyroid cancer victims and comes after the utility was told its figures were too conservative.
Each worker in this group was exposed to at least 100 millisieverts of radiation, projections show.
Although little is known about the exact health effects of radiation on the human body, the level is considered by doctors to be a possible threshold for increased cancer risk.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant became the site of the worst nuclear disaster in a generation after the massive tsunami of March 2011 destroyed its cooling systems.