Telephone Game for Nth Time: How "Fukushima's cesium contamination amounts to four Chernobyls" Came About (It's False, BTW)

I've lost track of how many telephone games there have been since March last year (here's one, I wrote more in Japanese blog), but here's the latest, and again it happened thanks to an English article written by a writer working for an English paper published by a Japanese newspaper. This time, it's Yomiuri's turn.

Here's Yomiuri Japanese on TEPCO's report of 900,000 terabequerels released from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant (part; 5/24/2012):

１～３号機から環境中に放出された放射性物質の総量（ヨウ素換算）は９０万テラ・ベクレル（１テラ・ベクレルは１兆ベクレル）と推定され、政府試算の１・２～１・９倍になった。

The total amount of radioactive materials released into the environment from Reactors 1 through 3 (iodine equivalence) is estimated to be 900,000 terabequerels (1 terabecquerel is 1 trillion becquerels), 1.2 to 1.9 times as much as the government's estimates.

The Japanese reporter correctly notes the number is iodine equivalence.

Here's Daily Yomiuri, Yomiuri's English paper, reporting on the same TEPCO report, but with a different focus (part below; 5/24/2012). It is not the translation of the Japanese article but its original article, focusing more on the difference between TEPCO's estimate and NISA's estimate. It also focuses only on iodine and cesium-137:

TEPCO combined the two methods and repeated its calculations under different conditions. It reached a final estimate of 400,000 terabecquerels of iodine-131 and 360,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137.

The amount of radioactive substances discharged in the Chernobyl accident in 1986 was 5.2 million terabecquerels.

Not just in the above quote but nowhere in the Daily Yomiuri article does the writer says the number for cesium-137 is iodine equivalence. Either the writer assumes the readers would know the numbers are iodine equivalence, or he/she didn't know how these numbers were calculated. I suppose you can infer that by looking at the number for the Chernobyl accident, but without the breakdown of the Chernobyl numbers you wouldn't necessarily realize that Chernobyl number is also iodine equivalence (which it is).

The number for cesium-137 itself, 360,000, is not what TEPCO reported either. TEPCO said "10,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137 times 40 to get the iodine equivalence of 400,000 terabecquerels" for INES evaluation.

But the English sites that read Daily Yomiuri's article (but not necessarily TEPCO's press release) naturally compared the numbers this way:

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 360,000 terabecquerels
Cesium-137 released from Chernobyl: 85,000 terabecquerels

without realizing the Fukushima number is iodine equivalence, and the Chernobyl number isn't. Thus the headlines like "Cesium-137 contamination: Fukushima amounts to four Chernobyls" at RT, for example.

But without the 40x multiplier on Fukushima, the numbers are (I use the correct number, 10,000 which would be 400,000 with 40x multiplier):

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 10,000 terabecquerels
Cesium-137 released from Chernobyl: 85,000 terabecquerels

Or with the 40x multiplier on Chernobyl to get iodine equivalence, the numbers are:

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 400,000 terabecquerels
Cesium-137 released from Chernobyl: 3,400,000 terabecquerels

As one of the readers of the blog commented, the meme, however false, that Fukushima contamination is 4 times worse than Chernobyl seems to have taken a life of its own and is spreading. It's doubly ironic that it is all thanks to Yomiuri Shinbun, pro-nuke establishment newspaper whose owner Matsutaro Shoriki did all he could to bring about a nuclear Japan and succeeded.

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