Chernobyl, Smernobyl – What Really Happened?

The media has been quick to invoke a sort of Chernobyl-like dread as regards the current crisis involving Japan’s nuclear power plants. While not wishing to diminish, or make light of today’s tragic events in Japan, or even those at Chernobyl years ago, it is important to maintain a clear-eyed perspective as to what did and didn’t happen as a result of Chernobyl.

The short answer seems to be, if public safety is the real issue, Japan and other nations would be better advised to outlaw living within a mile or two of the coast, as opposed to restricting the development of nuclear energy.

Tragically, as of this moment the death toll in Japan from recent events stands at 7,300, with another 11,000 people missing. Yet, even if events at one of Japan’s nuclear power plants to mirror Chernobyl -and they won’t for good reasons – one might expect a total of approximately 30 deaths from individuals actually engaged in work on site at said plant, with no detectable health issues across Japan’s, or the world’s population as a whole.

Obviously visions of so-called nuclear meltdowns, or explosions, frighten most everyone and prey on an almost inbred fear of nuclear radiation. Yet, years of study have produced no evidence to support said fears as regards Chernobyl – the worst accident in the history of the nuclear power industry.

In fact, years of study involving the World Health Organization, the United Nations, in conjunction with the International Atomic Energy Association, concluded that there was no detectable significant health disaster in the wake of Chernobyl, while fear and hyperbole extracted a much greater toll on the populations most directly involved. Even some of the cases of thyroid cancer noted below are believed to be partly the result of screening. In other words, they were detected by the study, but did not represent as great an increase as compared to un-screened populations as first thought.

In February 2003, the IAEA established the Chernobyl Forum, in cooperation with seven other UN organisations as well as the competent authorities of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. In April 2005, the reports prepared by two expert groups – “Environment”, coordinated by the IAEA, and “Health”, coordinated by WHO – were intensively discussed by the Forum and eventually approved by consensus. The conclusions of this 2005 Chernobyl Forum study (revised version published 2006i) are in line with earlier expert studies, notably the UNSCEAR 2000 reportj which said that “apart from this [thyroid cancer] increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.” As yet there is little evidence of any increase in leukaemia, even among clean-up workers where it might be most expected. However, these workers – where high doses may have been received – remain at increased risk of cancer in the long term. Apart from these, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) says that “the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”

The Chernobyl Forum report says that people in the area have suffered a paralysing fatalism due to myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation, which has contributed to a culture of chronic dependency. Some “took on the role of invalids.” Mental health coupled with smoking and alcohol abuse is a very much greater problem than radiation, but worst of all at the time was the underlying level of health and nutrition. Apart from the initial 116,000, relocations of people were very traumatic and did little to reduce radiation exposure, which was low anyway. Psycho-social effects among those affected by the accident are similar to those arising from other major disasters such as earthquakes, floods and fires.

An independent analysis by nuclear expert Zbigniew Jaworowski concluded and summarized much the same thing. See additional excerpts below. It is available in full here in pdf.

Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski is a retired chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).

It should also be noted that the Chernobyl reactor is seen as an inferior design, as much, if not more a result of the flawed Soviet system that produced and maintained it, than technology and processes known and available at the time. As pointed out by the Wall Street Journal, most scientists don’t believe Japan will rival Chernobyl, including due to improvements in containment technology and procedures.

We might want to take a page from FDR as regards nuclear energy, realizing that, in important ways, the main thing we have to fear from nuclear power is fear itself in our current technologically-advanced world. In a free and free-market world that thrives, if not lives and dies on energy, the consequences of abandoning, or curtailing the development of nuclear energy would, in all likelihood, be far more destructive and do more damage to specific populations and the population as a whole, than most any nuclear power accident, past, present, real, or imagined.

The Chernobyl accident was probably the worst possible catastrophe of a nuclear power station. It was the only such catastrophe since the advent of nuclear power 55 years ago. It resulted in a total meltdown of the reactor core, a vast emission of radionuclides, and early deaths of 31 persons. Its enormous political, economic, social and psychological impact was mainly due to deeply rooted radiophobia induced by the linear non-threshold (LNT) assumption on radiation health effects. It was an historic event that provided invaluable lessons for nuclear industry and risk philosophy. The accident demonstrated that using the LNT assumption as a basis for protection measures and radiation dose limitations was counterproductive, and led to sufferings and pauperization of millions of inhabitants of contaminated areas. The projections of thousands of late cancer deaths based on LNT are in conflict with observations that in comparison with general population of Russia, a 15% to 30% deficit of solid cancer mortality was found among the Russian emergency workers, and a 5% deficit of solid cancer incidence among the population of most contaminated areas.