Radiation from a stricken nuclear power plant in Japan is expected to have little impact on South Korea even if winds blow radioactive elements west toward the country, a local expert said Thursday.
Lee Jai-ki, a nuclear engineering professor at Seoul's Hanyang University, said in a gathering of local experts that the total amount of radioactive materials released into the atmosphere and the overall distance greatly reduced any health risks.
"The total amount of radiation released by the three reactors at Fukushima is thought to be much smaller than that spewed out during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster," he claimed.
The engineer said that if the amount released were to arrive over South Korea, the radiation level would be lower than the 0.1 millisievert (mSv) that an average person living in the country is exposed to every year. This is also smaller than amount of radiation a person can be exposed to as he or she travels by plane to the United States or Europe from South Korea.
He also said that data collected from Sweden, which is located about the same distance from Chernobyl as South Korea is to Fukushima, showed most radioactive materials being dispersed en route so fallout levels are negligible.
"In the case of Sweden, radiation levels peaked at 0.2 mSv, which is well below the 6 mSv limit set by Stockholm as being safe," Lee said.
The government had said last week that there is no need to be overly concerned since there was almost no possibility of winds blowing radioactive materials toward the Korean Peninsula. It pointed out that prevailing winds move from west to east in the region.
Related to radiation exposure, other nuclear and health experts from the Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Science and the Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) said South Korea is prepared for emergency situations involving radiation fallouts.
They said Seoul has enough doses of potassium iodide for 130,000 people, although there may be a need to increase supply to deal with bigger disasters that could occur.
The KFDA said that the country is carefully monitoring food imports from Japan, but said Tokyo had already stopped all farm products from being harvested from areas that have been exposed to fallout. (Yonhap)