Did the Fukushima cloud cause cancer?

Question

I was living in Spain. 9 or 10 days after the meltdown, I had been tracking the cloud as it passed over the US and then over the Atlantic. As it happened, there was a major rainstorm near Granada the day it passed over. Being paranoid, I told my GF to stay downstairs and we went below. The next day everything was coated in fine yellow dust. I have seen lots of Saharan dust deposited on patios but this wasn't the same.My friend who lived next door at the time is 52 now and, this year, was just diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. Right around when he was diagnosed, I started having pretty severe shortness of breath which I attributed to "long covid" and haven't checked out yet. Perhaps it's a months-long panic attack or a sympathetic condition to my friend's condition. But my mind keeps returning to that day with the yellow dust that dried up in droplets when the rain mixed with the Fukushima cloud that was only 9 days old.What are the odds that we both sucked in some cesium during that first pass around the globe? AFAIK it hadn't really rained out substantially anywhere before it hit Spain.

adastra22 · Accepted Answer

Zero. Whatever dust/pollen you observed on the ground after rainfall, that was not from Japan. That was not the nature of the released radiation.
The radiation released by Fukushima was minute, vastly overestimated at the time, and quickly diluted.
You need to stop stressing out over an event that is now over a decade old.

defrost · Answer

Half of one tenth of sweet bugger all . . .

Fukushima-related radioactive materials measured across entire Northern Hemisphere [1]

Scarey headline, right?

Check the details:

    The CTBTO's radionuclide stations are designed to register minuscule amounts of radioactive particles and noble gases -- down to a number of a few atoms. The system's sensitivity is second-to-none -- it can detect a concentration of 0.1 g of radioactive Xenon evenly distributed within the entire atmosphere of Earth. A rooftop detector at the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna still catches traces of emissions from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

They are literally counting atoms and the levels detected outside of the immediate area were way to low to pose any kind of serious health risk.

Precedure wise some of the US National laboratory tests amounted to putting fresh filters in truly massive high volume warehouse size HVAC systems, waiting for two weeks worth of fine particle dust to gather, shaking down the filters to concentrate particulate, and then letting that sit for 48 hours at the heart of an extremely sensitive gamma ray detector in order to get "target of interest" counts in the low hundreds swamped by a sea of always there regular background environmental radiation.

It's a triumph of modern instrumentation that signal was detected .. but not the smoking gun of increased cancer risk.

Although . . . if you do want to worry, there are still trace elements of those several hundred atmospheric atom bomb tests from the first part of the Cold War drifting about [2]

[1] (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110407121343.h...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-fallout-nuclear-weap...