At the end of last month the World Health Organization released its health risk assessment of the Fukushima accident. At 172 pages it is not light reading and I am still digesting it.
The main findings are well-known: that outside of Fukshima there are no predicted health affects, and that within the prefecture the risks for 2 or 3 kinds of cancers are raised marginally for people exposed as infants...in two small towns near the plant.
Since the risk is almost immeasurably small, and since the population of those two affected towns is also small, it is thought that any rise in the number of cancers will probably be undectable statistically; such is the importance of the mass of confounding factors when it comes to the health effects of low-dose radiation.
What stands out from a close reading of the report is how careful and moderated it is. The language is couched in terms of maybes and possiblys and likelys.
It is definitely worth noting that the authors have written a report that, if in error, errs on the side of caution. This is stated explicitly in the summary:
"The dose estimates and assumptions used in this assessment were deliberately chosen to minimize the possibility of underestimating eventual health risks."
Another way of putting this is to say that the potential of overestimating the health risks is very real.
Considering the shaky foundations of the LNT theory, it is indeed quite feasible that there will be no health affects at all. In any case, it will probably be impossible to prove one way or the other, simply because the concerned population will most probably end up indistinguishable from any other.
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