I'd be interested in Brian's take. There are 71 sailors suing TEPCO for illnesses due to radiation exposure. That's 71 out of a crew of 3200 (my understanding of the crew size).
EDIT: 5000 reported on the ship - see the article below.
It was hard to find any mainstream news sources (CNN, etc.) reporting on the story other than the case was thrown out of US court, refiled making less conspiratorial claims, and is ongoing.
For one thing, the sailors claim they didn't turn on the extensive radiation detection systems so it wasn't detected. Does that sound like something the US Navy would do: Send a nuclear powered ship into a nuclear accident situation with radiation detection systems turned off?
Secondly, the claim is the radiation entered the ship's water supply and all 3200 bathed in the water, drank it, brushed their teeth with it, etc. Seems to me that if the radiation was significant enough, more than 2% of the crew would have been affected.
The Reagan is stationed in SD. The local paper had this article:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Jan/12/are-sailors-symptoms-from-radiation/
But, contrary to what these sailors are experiencing, studies have found largely nondangerous radiation levels since the 2011 spill. Only workers at the nuclear facility have exhibited radiation amounts high enough to make them even slightly sick, scientists consulted for this story said.
One UC San Diego toxicology expert said that acute illness usually comes on quickly — in days or weeks — after massive exposure. Signs include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
Unless there are fatalities, people feel better within a few months. So, with typical radiation sickness, these Reagan sailors wouldn’t still have symptoms today.
Long-term illnesses, such as cancer, may result from a smaller amount of radiation exposure, but the amount required to cause them is unclear. And that type of ailment wouldn’t come on this soon, less than two years after the incident, said Dr. Richard Clark, director of UCSD’s medical toxicology program.
“What I imagined happened in this case is these people developed a few symptoms and they started to get worried about it because they were told there was some higher radiation,” Clark said. “They scrubbed off the (Reagan’s) deck — that is normal procedure if there is fallout. But that fallout doesn’t mean you were exposed to levels of radiation that were dangerous.”
At a Health Physics Society conference last year at the National Press Club, a panel of radiation scientists predicted that illness from Fukushima will be far less than from the 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster.
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Less than 150 of 17,000 workers at the Fukushima plant showed slightly elevated levels of radiation, according to figures from cancer specialist Dr. John Boice, a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. The doses detected might increase their lifetime risk of cancer by 2 percent, he said at the Press Club conference.
On the Reagan, the crew was ordered to close hatches and vents to prevent outside air from entering. They were also told not to drink the ship’s potable water.
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With more than 5,000 people aboard, the Reagan was operating at sea about 100 miles northeast of the power plant following the earthquake.
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At the time, the Reagan’s skipper, Capt. Thom Burke released a statement reassuring crew families that “as a nuclear-power aircraft carrier, we have extensive technical expertise onboard to properly monitor such types of risks.”
