ADVANCEMENT OF THE SCIENCE
b:;r(*; This article is a 12-year retrospective of the Fukushima nuclear disaster with a 7-year revisitation of our publication, “Implications of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Man-Made Hazards, Vulnerability Fac- tors, and Risk to Environmental Health” (Eddy & Sase, 2015). We shed light on early and erroneous assumptions made about the global environmental health impact, as well as follow up on prolonged site remediation dicul- ties and controversial scheduled discharges of containerized wastewater. As we developed a refreshed vision of the triple nuclear reactor meltdown, we incorporated lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in a novel and universally applicable Public Health, Healthcare, and Emer- gency Management Command and Support Supersystem Model. The model addresses all-hazards readiness needs, which is a core compo- nent of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, U.S. Department of Homeland Secu- rity/Federal Emergency Management Agency, and U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) guidelines and law. The model and associated narrative is intended to guide future global and international public health threat planning and response and provide a decision support tool for state and local public health, emergency management, and homeland security practitioners. The model integrates core aspects of U.S. emergency prepared- ness and response federal doctrine and CMS regulations—representing mul- tiple agencies, professions, and healthcare facility guidelines—with an inte- grated foundation of practical concepts from One Health, public health, and all-hazards approaches. Although internationally coordinated public health threat prevention and containment is the primary point of emphasis, our model can be applied at all jurisdictional levels. The COVID-19 Pandemic, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, and Commonalities and Public Health Threat Complexities: A Public Health, Healthcare, and Emergency Management Command and Support Supersystem Model
ity and a level reached previously only with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (The National Diet of Japan, 2012). The eects of the Fuku- shima nuclear disaster continue today, with- out the shielding sarcophagus that entombed the immediate and acute radiation threat in the Chernobyl disaster. Japan has, however, reversed its movement away from reliance on nuclear energy post-disaster in policies that align with a growing global nuclear power renaissance. These policies are aimed spe- cifically at aggressively building new nuclear reactors and extending the lifespan of exist- ing reactors by 20 years, even in the continu- ing global absence of nuclear waste disposal capacity (Noriyuki, 2022). Early disaster reports contained assump- tions that most of the radionuclides were dis- charged directly into the Pacific Ocean and thus justified threat assumptions gauged in comparison to the Chernobyl disaster. These threat assumptions included expediency of food safety precautions, securement of the rel- ative area of impacted ecosystems, eciency of evacuations, and an absence of immediate human deaths from radiation exposure (Stein- hauser et al., 2014). Accounts of the disaster in print frequently relegated the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the title of the “second worst nuclear accident in history” (Bendix, 2019; Encyclopædia Britannica, 2022). In the U.S., news media reported that traces of the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster were detected by monitors through- out the U.S. at thresholds below levels that could possibly be of public health concerns (Guarino, 2012; Toro, 2011). The reporting echoed the message in an announcement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Christopher Eddy, MPH, REHS, CP-FS School of Science, Engineering, and Technology, College of Nursing and Health Care Professions, Grand Canyon University Emergency Preparedness and Response, Fairfax County Health Department Eriko Sase, PhD Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo Global Health Research Center of Japan, University of Nagasaki Saitama Prefectural University
Double Natural Disaster On March 11, 2011, after the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake (also called the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami)—the strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history—a 133-ft tsunami triggered a cascad- ing sequence of power loss events that caused
three nuclear reactor cores to melt com- pletely, culminating in a massive release of radiation (Eddy & Sase, 2015; World Nuclear Association, 2022). The Fukushima nuclear disaster was designated an International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) Level 7 major accident, which is the highest level of sever-
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Volume 85 • Number 7
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