“Personally, nuclear power makes me a bit nervous,” Ken Sasaki, a construction ministry official in Japan, told the Los Angeles Times at the height of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe. “But as a nation, I still think we need it.”

Sasaki’s patriotic instinct turned out to have a longer half-life than his personal misgivings. Although the Fukushima plant was hit by a tsunami and underwent partial meltdowns, the emergency caused no cases of radiation sickness, let alone deaths.

“There were no acute radiation injuries or deaths among the workers or the public due to exposure to radiation resulting from the [nuclear plant] incident,” the World Health Organization reported five years after the disaster. The most intense exposures recorded as a result of the Fukushima incident were equivalent to radiation doses experienced in many medical treatments.

At that time, experts were warning of a permanent Chernobyl-style zone of alienation in the Fukushima Prefecture, while Americans on the West Coast prepared for heavy radiation exposure. What explains the disparity between the dire warnings and the thankfully mild result?

It’s a mindset that could be called “radiophobia,” a combination of legitimate concerns about radiation risks with a fundamental misunderstanding of how radiation works.

“[T]he average person in the U.S. receives an effective dose of about 3 mSv per year from natural radiation,” according to RadiologyInfo.org, a website published by the American College of Radiology. (A mSv or millisievert is one-thousandth of a sievert. A sievert measures the effective dose of ionizing radiation.) In that context, Fukushima exposure levels, while serious, were not cataclysmic.

“[T]he average lifetime effective doses for adults in the Fukushima prefecture were estimated to be around 10 mSv or less,” reported the World Health Organization.

“[T]he average workers’ effective dose over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 mSv,” according to Tokyo Electric Power Company reporting.

RadiologyInfo.org reports that a single computed tomography or CT scan of the abdomen and pelvic region, repeated with and without contrast material, has an approximate effective radiation dose of 15.4 mSv.

Despite the low-level doses of ionizing radiation received by people in the Fukushima area, governments around the world overreacted, letting radiophobia run far ahead of the facts.

In Italy, 94% of voters approved a referendum opposing plans to restart the country’s nuclear program. Although nuclear power meets 30-40% of their nation’s electricity demand, Swiss voters rejected any plans for new nuclear plants and targeted all existing plants for closure by 2034.

No policy overreaction to Fukushima tops the German response, however. Germany has long had a loud anti-nuclear movement, and activists didn’t let the crisis go to waste. After more than 200,000 German citizens participated in anti-nuclear protests in 2011, Germany ignored its Reactor Safety Commission’s report that all German reactors were safe and chose to close all of its nuclear capacity. At that time, nuclear made up about a quarter of the nation’s electricity supply. As a result of this decision, nuclear now supplies 0%.

This knee-jerk move started a chain reaction that still haunts the Germans today. After rapidly shuttering its nuclear generation, Germany still needed to meet electricity demand. The country reopened fossil fuel plants (mostly lignite — lower-rank coal) to replace the baseload role that nuclear once filled. Committed to their carbon dioxide reduction goals, the Germans also embarked on the Energiewende program, a strident push toward a grid powered primarily by wind and solar power and devoid of nuclear and fossil-fueled electricity.

But Energiewende has been a colossal failure, bringing energy insecurity and making electricity more expensive than that found in nuclear-powered neighbor France. Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power led it to rely even more heavily on coal and natural gas. Because the environmentalists holding power oppose domestic natural gas production, those energy sources had to be imported from Russia.

With the Russia-Ukraine War, Germany has had to rely even more heavily on low-rank lignite coal to ensure its citizens do not freeze to death. All because environmentalists overreacted to the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s zero deaths.

Likely, the hysterics from the media and lawmakers over the Fukushima incident acted as the turning point toward a dangerous and foolish energy policy that holds up wind and solar as the only legitimate electricity generation options.

The stalling of nuclear power in the United States occurred due to a different sort of radiophobia. The Fukushima incident was used to frighten people about nuclear energy.

Lost in the panic was that Fukushima was the site of an unprecedented and largely unpredictable disaster, yet the non-lethal result amounts to a powerful argument not against nuclear power but for it.

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami was the country’s largest magnitude earthquake ever recorded, and it killed more than 18,000 people. The subsequent tsunami flooded the plant’s backup generators (the company has been heavily criticized for not locating the generators on higher floors or in a protected location) and caused a partial reactor meltdown — generally recognized as the worst type of nuclear accident. Yet amid a profound national tragedy, radiation did not even make anybody sick.

Looking back at the Fukushima story indicates there was far less harm caused during the accident than the public was led to believe. The harm caused by the global reaction, however, was widespread and is still holding us back.

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