Ukrainian envoy urges Japan to seek world help over nuclear crisis

Apr 26, 2011, 13:59 GMT

Tokyo - The Ukrainian ambassador to Japan urged Tokyo Tuesday to disclose all data and seek further international cooperation to deal with the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Mykola Kulinich said those were the crucial lessons of the Chernobyl disaster, the world's worst nuclear accident, which happened exactly 25 years ago in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union.

'In our case, we lost the chance of international cooperation to handle this accident at the very beginning. We tried to manage everything by our own. Any advice (from) outside was ignored,' Kulinich said.

It was a 'big mistake' and a 'big lesson' that the Soviet Union gave no data and exact statistical indicators to the international community, which led to a failure in handling the 1986 disaster, Kulinich was quoted by Kyodo News as saying.

Kulinich said Soviet scientists and engineers had been coping with the disaster without direct contact with foreign experts until 1990.

The Soviet Union kept secret all information about the accident and the environmental pollution and it announced that the accident happened only two days later, Kyodo said. Experts argued many thyroid cancers could have been prevented if iodine pills had been taken on time.

'I think and wish this scale of (international) cooperation should be bigger and wider' in Japan, Kulinich said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima plant was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and has been leaking radiation ever since.

He said that Japan had been working with other countries and international organizations to cope with the nuclear crisis.

Two weeks ago, the Japanese government raised the accident level at the Fukushima plant to seven, the highest on an international scale, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster.

But Kulinich stressed that the Chernobyl disaster was very different from the Fukushima accident in terms of scale and background.

Chernobyl was caused by human error and a design fault, leading to an explosion that destroyed the core of reactor number 4, Kulinich was quoted as saying by Kyodo.

The crisis at Fukushima was not an explosion, but a radiation leakage triggered by an unprecedented natural disaster, Kulinich said.

The total amount of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima plant is expected to be one-tenth of the radioactive discharge from the Chernobyl disaster, he added.

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