The inherent weakness of the GE Mark I design, recognized at the time of its first licensing in the United States, is referred to by this anonymous, heroic worker who admits his participation in a "myth of infallible safety" in an interview with Al Jazeera. He describes his willingness to be a nuclear "kamikaze":
Regardless of official cover-ups, the distortion of health effect statistics, and fraudulent death tolls, "nuclear radiation is the most carcinogenic toxin that exists", and this Japanese worker knows it. So does the president of the Italian Association of Medical Oncology from whom this quote comes. In retrospect, there was an official understatement of the effects of the second worst nuclear disaster in history at Chernobyl. Independent research of the health effects contradicts the earlier UN studies which minimized mortality (only 4,000 attributable, fatal cancer cases) In reality, approximately one million casualties resulted from the 1986 disaster in the Ukraine (Yablokov, 2009, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences). Fukushima Prefecture is much more densely populated than the region around Chernobyl.