"After Chernobyl, the Soviets were afraid to admit to the accident, and at first they didn’t evacuate people from the surrounding area. A large proportion of the radioactive material in the plant went into the sky due to the explosion and fire. Neither of these is true in Japan. But even at Chernobyl, almost all the impact was on the workers in the nuclear plant. Although the local population experienced some small, long-term cancer risk, most of the health impact was from stress, anxiety and fear. That is not to be sneezed at, but that, not radiation, was the major disruption in life, even to this day, and will probably be so in Japan as well."