Methods: We culled published information on the disaster: national and international nuclear industry standards and agency reports (JAEC, TEPCO, Japanese government); scientific papers; publications by international and American nuclear associations (IAEA, PSR, ANS, US DOE, and USNRC); and reports on Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and nuclear accidents at other sites.
Results: Environmental impacts: a prolonged site black-out, three melted reactor cores, thousands of damaged spent nuclear fuel rods, and discharges of radioactive water to the ocean caused massive volumes of radiation to be released to the air, ground, aquifer, sea, humans, plants and animals. Human rights consequences: over 102,000 persons evacuated; many of them had to evacuate multiple times [restriction of the right to movement, education and work]. They also evacuated to areas with high radiation because the evacuation instructions were made ad hoc, and based upon limited information [restriction of right to information]. However, immediate measures were taken to provide healthcare services and goods to the victims and evacuees by assuring access to universal health care [right to health].Conclusions: The Fukushima nuclear disaster demonstrated that human rights and environmental health are profoundly related. It also exposed vulnerabilities of an industry and the limits of agencies that are important to domestic and international disaster planning. At the same time, it has provided an opportunity for public health professionals, environmental health practitioners in particular, to share their broad knowledge and experiences of disaster preparedness/ emergency response, and environmental hazard risk, end-fate and prevention. Such practice would lead future collaborations with the international, national and community stakeholders to establish a protection scheme in policies by imbedding impact assessments for environmental health and human rights.
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