Japan Recognizes First Thyroid Cancer Case As Fukushima Related, Offers Compensation

By Whitney Webb

Even though Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster to have taken place in the last 30 years, you probably haven’t heard much about it. After the Tohoku earthquake in eastern Japan and subsequent tsunami, one of the cooling systems at Fukushima’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) nuclear power plant failed. The result was a devastating triple reactor meltdown that led to the evacuation of over half a million people and the creation of a 20-kilometer exclusion zone.

Ever since the disaster, TEPCO as well as the Japanese government have consistently tried to downplay the disaster’s impacts nationally and globally. The collusion was so blatant that even TEPCO’s company president, Naomi Hirose, admitted that a “cover-up” had taken place.

However, some of Fukushima’s effects are so obvious that even the Japanese government cannot continue to deny the enormity of the 2011 disaster. Within the last five years, many of the workers present at the Fukushima nuclear plant during the meltdown, as well as those involved in its clean-up, have developed cancer. Of the numerous workers seeking compensation, only two workers with leukemia were found to be entitled to workplace compensation by the Japanese health ministry. Yet, neither of these workers have so far received any money from the government for their treatment.

Now, that is set to change. On Friday, Japan’s health ministry concluded that another worker, diagnosed with thyroid cancer three years ago, developed his illness due to radiation exposure during his time working for TEPCO. The man had worked at several nuclear power plants with the company between 1992 and 2012 and was present at the Fukushima plant during the disaster. The radiation present in the man’s body was found to be about 150 millisieverts, with 140 of which were believed to be a result of the 2011 disaster. This marks the first time that a former worker with thyroid cancer has won the right to work-related compensation as many other similar cases were previously rejected by the Japanese government.

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