During her appearance on the Today Show, Geraldine Thomas, head of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College, London, explained that the scientific community drastically overestimated the real health consequences of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan. Five years after the disaster made headlines around the world, data from the affected areas is coming in, showing the radiation experienced was far smaller than previously calculated. While many compared the accident to an atomic weapon blast, 95% of the population received a mere 1 millisievert of gamma radiation – comparable to a tenth of an average CT scan. Thomas went on to explain that, in the future, similar nuclear reactor malfunctions can be treated as less of threat to public health, and government officials do not need to evacuate the majority of the population.