Dr. Conca reports that tomorrow, April 26, 2019 marks the 33rd anniversary of the worst commercial nuclear accident in the world, and the only incident to kill anyone with radioactivity – the Soviet Union’s RBMK reactor meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986. A few weeks from now, HBO will show a new movie, Chernobyl, that will dramatize the event. From the trailer, it might actually describe what happened inside the power plant, and nearby surroundings, pretty well. And it will certainly capture the fear very well. But it will fail yet again to describe what happened outside and far away, sensationalizing and exaggerating the effects, and reinforcing the myth that many thousands of people died from radiation in Ukraine, Belarus and Europe.
It will not reveal that only the fear of radiation killed anyone outside the immediate area. All health and epidemiological studies ( see references: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) have shown that the long-term mental health effects were the only significant public health consequence of the accident outside of the vicinity of Chernobyl. For example, in 2015, the National Institutes of Health declared that, “In spite of the best efforts of statisticians and epidemiologists, the claimed thousands of Chernobyl-induced cancers and mutations have yet to manifest themselves.” And we have been looking really, really hard for 33 years.
Surprisingly, there were three other nuclear reactors at the same Chernobyl plant that kept running for many years afterwards. 3,000 people went to work at the Chernobyl plant every day and had no problem with health or radiation effects. And when humans left the area after the accident, wild animals and birds moved back in and thrived - wolves, elk, wild boars, white-tailed eagles, owls, cranes, black storks - and show no radiation effects. Chernobyl is now a growing tourist attraction with over 60,000 people visiting in 2018.
So how many people did die? 340,000 people were evacuated or resettled after the accident. Five million people live in what many consider contaminated areas in northern Europe, but no radiation-induced health effects have been observed in these groups because the radiation doses were so low. And their resettlement is now considered a grave mistake that destroyed the lives of an entire generation. Several organizations have reported on the impacts of the Chernobyl accident, but all have had problems assessing the significance of their observations because of the lack of reliable public health information in this region before 1986. The inability to establish a control group led to wild assertions of health effects that were little more than made up.
The World Health Organization first raised concerns in 1989 that local medical personnel had incorrectly attributed various biological and health effects to radiation exposure. Following this, the Soviet Government requested the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to coordinate an international experts' assessment of the Chernobyl accident's radiological, environmental and health consequences.
Between March 1990 and June 1991, a total of 50 field missions were conducted by 200 experts from 25 countries, seven organizations, and 11 laboratories. In the absence of pre-1986 data, they compared a control population known to not have been affected by the disaster with those exposed to radiation. Significant health disorders were evident in both control and exposed groups, but none were related to radiation. The health effects, including deaths, were thoroughly documented by the Chernobyl Forum September 6-7, 2005 in Vienna in their resultant report. The Chernobyl Forum was established by the IAEA in 2003 to provide an authoritative consensus on the impact of the accident.
Forum members included the IAEA, the United Nations Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. The governments of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were also members of the Forum.
As summarized by Dr. William Burchill, former President of the American Nuclear Society, the actual fatalities were:
- 2 immediate, non-radiation deaths,
- 28 early fatalities from radiation within 4 months,
- 19 late adult fatalities presumably from radiation over the next 20 years, although this number is within the normal incidence of cancer mortality in this group, which is about 1% per year, and
- 9 late child fatalities from radiation resulting in thyroid cancer out of about 3,000 that were diagnosed and cured or minimized by iodine 131 treatments.
These last 9 are an inexcusable tragedy since they were totally avoidable with warning from the Soviet government (which they intentionally failed to do in time), and appropriate administration of potassium iodide prior to the plume reaching that area, also failed by the Soviets. In addition, almost a thousand emergency workers thrown into the fire in the first days of the accident by the Soviets received high doses of radiation, and about 50 died from cancer and other health issues.
According to Mikhail Balonov, Secretary of Science at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the 600,000 recovery and operations workers that have worked at Chernobyl since the accident, and the 5 million residents of the contaminated areas in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, received minor doses comparable to natural background radiation. There have been no observable radiation-induced health effects in these people. And certainly none have occurred in areas outside these regions which received even less dose. As concluded in the 2008 report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.”
Immediately after the accident, the ultra-conservative regulatory-based Linear No-Threshold (LNT) dose hypothesis was used to guesstimate that about 4,000 deaths should eventually occur by radiation from Chernobyl, but these still have not been observed. The United Nations has since warned that using the LNT model to calculate such deaths is an incorrect use of this model, and should be avoided.
The irony is that this number of 4,000 deaths was taken by the media as being conservative, when it was truly super-liberal, and was doubled and tripled over and over, until some people started putting out numbers closer to a million, a favorite number of anti-nuclear ideologues. This week, these numbers will be rampant throughout the news media and blogosphere on Chernobyl’s anniversary. However, as with Fukushima, the most significant health and economic problems came from the perceived severity of the accident and the fear spread through misunderstanding of radiation effects and the sometimes unethical exploitation of the refugees and of the issue of radiation safety.
I hope this new movie doesn’t just pile on, but I’m afraid it will. Let's take notes and report !
Original working URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/04/25/chernobyl-truth-drowns-in-dramatized-movie/#21fb6cc3431d
Managed by I2M Consulting, LLC