The pictures are lovely and the reflections profound. But much of the cited data here appears wrong. For instance, the article states (italicized): "six hundred helicopter pilots were killed" and yet it was only 600 helicopter pilots who _flew_ liquidator missions[1], two of which were killed in an piloting accident and none were registered killed from immediate radiation exposure[2], though at least one eventually died from cancer likely from this exposure[3]. Similarly a claim of "Over six hundred thousand people were directly involved in dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion" is not supported by the evidence[4].
I don't mean any of this to lessen the enormity of what happened and the tremendous, noble effort made by the liquidators to remediate what was there at great personal cost. It's just good when making specific claims for those claims to be substantiated.
I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.
One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, and I'm not sure if any of us will ever know for sure, but one of the documentaries I like is Discovery's "Battle of Chernobyl," since it includes a lot of interviews with people who were actually there and participated in the events. They interview Nikolay Antoshkin, the colonel general in charge of the helicopter operations there, which is where the 600 pilot deaths number comes from. I'm more inclined to believe that account than what the state published.
> One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.
I believe the IAEA report (which you can read yourself) put together by the United Nations and relevant affected governments in the mid-2000s. It shows that over the entire course of time 4,000 people will have died prematurely as a result of the accident at Chernobyl (including people who killed themselves because they feared they were "contaminated"), and between 31 and 54 people died between both the explosion itself and to acute radiation injuries in the immediate aftermath -- including the helicopter pilots you mention. [1]
I also believe that 7.3 million people die every year as a direct result of the burning of fossil fuels. [2]
Everything is trade-offs. The accident was bad, and it could have been an awful lot worse. On the other hand, it's important we not lose sight of the big picture. When humans get hurt, they learn why, and move forward - this should not be an exception.
> It makes a lot more sense to compare high-tech nuclear energy with high-tech renewables (with storage).
If you really want to compare that, rooftop solar actually has a significant risk of worker death. I am willing to bet that, per TWh, there would be significantly more deaths with solar than nuclear.
Your hypothesis made sense to me, so I did a bit of research to try and back up the claim.
No idea about the biases or accuracy of the information supplied in these links, so take it with a grain of salt, but they seem to support the idea that Solar (installation) is indeed more dangerous than Nuclear per TWh.
Too many factors to call it more "dangerous", and also disingenuous because the absolute worst case scenario for solar power doesn't have the possibility of negatively impacting millions of peoples lives.
But hey, this is a bit of a fun fact that might stop people demonising nuclear energy so much.
The absolute worst case scenario for Chernobyl would have happened if the corium had melted through to the water table and caused a huge steam explosion. This was narrowly avoided. It's hard to estimate the impact but at the very least a much larger area would have been heavily irradiated.
Deaths/TrKWhr isn't a useful measure, because nuclear has a binary risk profile. When it goes badly wrong it does a lot of lasting economic damage, in ways that other energy sources don't.
There's also no way to compare "TCO" like for like because coal etc are nasty immediate pollutants, while nuclear waste remains a problem for a very long time.
The real problem with nuclear isn't the technology, it's the trustworthiness of the management culture around it. If the industry was a byword for truth, honesty, and straight dealing it would be perceived in a much less negative way.
That doesn't seem to be how the industry operates.
Interestingly enough Wiki notes a EU study[0][1] that shows that nuclear and wind are some of the cheapest energy sources when you price in environmental effects and health costs.
People "demonizing" nuclear typically do it because of the potential devastating consequences of an accident, and the uncertainty of storing waste for thousands of years. Not because they think nuclear have a high death toll in everyday use.
But the potential devastation isn’t rooted in reality - anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl the numbers haven’t been very high.
The alternatives, even the green ones like hydroelectric, have dwarfed nuclear-related deaths hundreds, if not thousands, of times over with single catastrophes[0].
Arguments against the storage of nuclear fuel usually don’t understand how little waste there is and, even still, burying a problem for 200 years while we figure out how to deal with it is an infinite number of times better than dealing with the fallout of global warming by not shifting to nuclear energy.
I'm actually pro nuclear, but I get concerned when I see people downplaying the risks. The only way we can have safe nuclear is if people actually understand and take the risks seriously and put oversight and safeguards in place. E.g. saying that Chernobyl is the "worst that could happen" is just willfully ignorant. Chernobyl was bad but could have been a lot worse.
Even then, nobody even knows or agrees how many victims Chernobyl have claimed or will still claim.
Comparing nuclear-related deaths to the Chinese dam disaster is a bit disingenuous also. China did not have nuclear power in the same time period, so of course no nuclear-related deaths happened. But if China had had enough nuclear plants to replace dams and they had the same amount of construction errors, removal of safety features, bad management and a "once in 2000 years" unforeseen natural disaster - are you sure no nuclear accidents would have happened?
If you just compare absolute numbers, you will see walking is more dangerous than skydiving.
> anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl
The miniseries makes it clear that the absolute worst outcomes at Chernobyl were prevented through huge effort: water was drained from the tanks under the meltdown, so there was no steam explosion that would have smashed the other reactor cores as well. The meltdown then did not burn through the concrete and into the groundwater table.
Are you telling me that this chart [1] is pure correlation with no causation whatsoever? Do you live in the area affected by the Chernobyl disaster? (I do). Or do you live half a world away with no direct health-related stake in this? Even so, why are you content with hiding under the rug these "statistical anomalies"?
The 7.3 million figure is like the “12 years left” figure, that is to say it requires a little work to understand where it came from and what it means.
“Ambient air pollution was responsible for 4.3 million deaths” and “3.8 million
deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cookstoves and fuels”.
I haven’t dug into the indoor figures but a quick reading suggests that attributing the death toll to fossil fuels in general is misreading the report.
For example, ”91% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries” so the bigger problem is how the fuel is used - since richer countries actually use more fuel per capita.
Cooking with coal on an open stove in an unventilated room will slowly kill you from the carbon particulate. Apparently this is a large percentage of the indoor pollution death statistic. The problem here is coal stoves specifically not fossil fuels in general.
The outdoor statistic is a bit more interesting. The Model they use to calculate the number [1] basically takes a curve of PM exposure level across populations around the world, multiplied by an integrated exposure-response (IER) function.
Over the last few years they have lowered the counterfactual concentration (the point below which PM has no efffect) and steepened the IER.
Through this methodology they can arrive at a death rate of nearly 5 million without a single death certificate ever actually stating “air pollution”.
They do this by trying to tease out the damage done by PM by observing places where PM has changed and then looking at how mortality rate due to cancers and such also changed.
It’s an interesting figure, but in a sense misses the forest for the trees.
Particulate matter definitely has adverse heath effects. One study said an average shortening of life expectancy in Europe of 9 months. But the overall “industry” that creates PM (everything from cars kicking up dust on the road to smokestacks) also is responsible for the modern world where ~8 billion people can survive. Is PM shortening lifespans? Or is PM drastically extending lifespans (e.g. preventing mass starvation) while simultaneously also somewhat shortening an idealized life that could have magically gotten everything it needed to survive except without any PM.
If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it would also be useful to consider the net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.
> If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it should be a net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.
Respectfully I disagree. You've conflated the primary effect and the side-effect. The primary effect is energy is generated and energy is what has improved our lives. The side-effect is PM exposure which is killing us. Burning fossil fuels isn't extending anyone's lives. Generating energy is. If we can trade it out for a better method the same extension of life persists, and the premature deaths drop. Thus, we can factor it out. The truth is, it does both things, and we need to switch it out for an energy source which only does the former without doing the latter.
Imagine for a second a power plant that generates electricity but once in a while it murders a random passer-by. It think it's fair to say the power plant is responsible for those murders, and we can talk about replacing it without having to talk about all the good it's doing.
I actually agree with you and edited my comment before reading your reply to soften that specific part (should be -> could be useful to consider)
I think the interesting thing which the statistic misses is that people are still choosing to light that stove with coal even though the PM it creates is damaging their health, because it’s the least worst option.
Outside PM is different because it can come from the factory down the road producing widgets for some other country, but the fact that inside PM contributes to nearly the same negative health impact, that is not a government intervention / negative externality! Starve with clean air or cook food for your family. This isn’t a fossil fuel problem, and isn’t something that can be switched out in any sense.
A makeshift stove can burn coal and cook a meal. You’ll never match that with any non-emitting technology because it will always require some investment where literally none is available.
Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable and I should have addressed that in my reply too. There's definitely a big difference between PM released by factories and that of individuals cooking/heating/etc with coal.
> A makeshift stove can burn coal and cook a meal. You’ll never match that with any non-emitting technology because it will always require some investment where literally none is available.
True, I just hope that cheaper, clean power (whatever that means) allows more people to make the healthy choice.
To be clear, the other points I agreed with in large part.
I see interviews with Antoshkin about the lack of precautions taken for the pilots, in stories citing the "600" number as the total number of pilots involved, but nothing establishing 600 fatalities.
I screened the Discovery documentary you're referring to and watched all the segments in which Antoshkin appears. It's the narrator of the special who claims 600 helicopter pilot fatalities, not Antoshkin himself, unless I've missed something. Can the 600 number be squared with the number of helicopters involved (the documentary claims 60, I think) and the number of missions the pilots fly (dozens per day), and with the fact that you can find some of those pilots giving interviews just a few years ago?
> One thing I've found interesting in talking about
> Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often
> willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they
> confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively
> "safe" even in case of disaster.
I figure it balances out the people who are extremely critical of nuclear power and accept that there could actually have been a 5 megaton explosion.
I'm not a strong advocate of nuclear power myself, but I tend to discount the value of Chernobyl as an argument for/against nuclear power. It was a terrible design in addition to being old, had little in the way of containment, and the games the operators were playing with the plant were off-the-charts stupid. Compared even to the oldest commercial Western-design reactors, it is a horrid contraption.
And even still the remaining 3 reactors at the Chernobyl plant continued to operate safely, the last one closing in the year 2000. There’s a number of RBMK reactors in use today; they learned from the accident and patched up the issues. Not to say the new western reactors aren’t better, the very much are.
After a magnitude 9 earthquake, one of those older reactors at Fukushima "just" melted down, and core material probably hasn't escaped secondary containment (unfortunately the water pumped through the core is a different story). In contrast, during a botched safety test the reactor core at Chernobyl exploded.
The impact to the surrounding environment was many orders of magnitude greater at Chernobyl, which is what happens when the reactor core explodes.
~50 people died at Chernobyl from acute radiation exposure in the first few weeks, and a couple employees actually got exploded. Lots of people died in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but none like that.
Please consider how you're hurting folks' ability to make good decisions when you spread misleading absolutist nonsense.
I don't see thousands of people adversely affected by renewable energy for years (due to cancer, displacement and other health issues). Only counting deaths does not paint an accurate picture.
Besides, noone knows the total cost of nuclear energy because noone has solved the nuclear waste problem for 100,000+ years. There are likely to be billions of dollars needed to be spent on this long term issue.
Sorry but 600 pilot fatalities in the Chernobyl disaster is just plain nonsense, no matter what you might believe about soviets.
> I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.
You seem to be assuming malice when there's mostly incompetence, and giving too much credibility to huge organizations; they aren't perfectly coordinated black boxes in control of everything they are trying to do. Chernobyl disaster has been cross documented top to bottom in that regard. Most of the missing info was due to corruption, see the song "Я вынес из зоны" by Sergey Uryvin as an example. There was an attempt to downplay the incident early on, but one simply cannot hide the disaster of that scale. Neither there was much desire to do this internally, after the scale became apparent. Besides, most of the information wasn't coming from authorities.
The only reason one can be uncertain about such ridiculous claims is unfamiliarity with the details of the disaster, and/or lack of understanding of culture at the time and also the language.
1) If you prefer we can multiply all the numbers by 100, nuclear is still better than what we actually did over the past 40 years since Chernobyl.
2) We have actual evidence of how a similar-era nuclear reactor fails in Fukushima (it was built in the 80s iirc). If we write off the Soviet numbers as misinformation, then using a strictly evidence-based approach and extrapolating from Fukushima, their numbers were overexaggurating the damage.
I doubt they were exaggurating, I think Chernobyl was a lot nastier than Fukushima, but as a commited nuclear advocate, the idea that I'm relying on Soviet numbers is a misrepresentation. I'm relying on the divide-by-40-years, the linear-no-threshold-model-is-not-sensible and the by-gum-we-know-a-lot-more-about-how-to-design-things-safely-since-we-are-now-in-2020 arguments (3 sig. fig). Also the this-thing-is-millions-of-times-more-energy-dense-than-anything-else-it-is-amazing-we-are-talking-orders-of-magnitude-improvment-your-brain-probably-can't-imagine-that-without-special-training motivating factor.
> since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading
There's also the opposite - cold war era propaganda trying to make the Russians seem backwards and primitive. The Soviet Union at the time was also opening up through glasnost.
On top of this, fossil fuel companies had a lot to gain through scaremongering around nuclear energy. It worked as very well as almost all planned nuclear power plants were mothballed.
Discovery channel where every single documentary is staged, exaggerated and filled with useless emotions. Even the department of information in the Soviet Union is more reliable than that.
Even if a thousands died from Chernobyl, it reflects the danger of the Soviet system, not of nuclear energy.
Just take the thing we learned in this week's episode: The design flaw on the RBMK reactors that caused the explosion had been observed before, but the report was classified to not put the glorious Soviet nuclear technology in a bad light!!!
In any remotely sane system, security risks are published and compensated for. The operators would have known about this risk, and not pressed the fateful AZ-5 button that caused the explosion
I kinda miss your point. What then does the Fukushima incident reflect? Danger of Japanese system, lol? Or as the US contractors built it, the US system?
As according analysis [1] the Fukushima station design itself did not consider the natural features of place. Chernobyl incident happened due to human error, according to same source.
Fukushima was a very extreme natural disaster striking at a precise location to expose that the Fukushima reactors were not fully ready for a theoretically possible but never in 1000+ years of Japanese history observed earthquake.
15,897 people died in Japan that day, in buildings, roads, and vehicles. None from the nuclear incident. Yet no one talks about how the building, road, and vehicle security failed and wants to ban those.
Sure, the Fukushima security could and should have been better. The industry has learned the lessons, as it does from all accidents. But even if it didn't, we could easily absorb accidents like these for once in a 1000+ years and still be the cleanest energy form there is.
The comparison with Chernobyl is no comparison. That was an unforced error on a calm spring night. Operators doing experiments on badly designed reactors with known flaws they were not informed about because it would look bad to spread the information that pressing a certain button in a certain situation was risky. So they pressed the button, and the reactor exploded.
If the exclusion zones were made as excessive as Chernobyl, sure, but most of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is safe today, and most of the rest could be made safe with relatively little additional effort. With even a somewhat more reasonable exclusion zone, if that was the trade-off and we could save those who die from fossil fuel plants today, it'd be an easy choice for my part.
Of course it's not a realistic trade-off - it's "easy" to make plants vastly safer than either.
> I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.
I'd add the Romanian authorities to that list (I'm from Romania). Looking at the areas contaminated with Cesium-137 [1] one can see that Bulgaria is reasonably high in that list while Romania is no-where to be found, even though my country physically stands between Bulgaria and Chernobyl. The reason for that is that Ceausescu's regime was either too incompetent or too ideologically corrupt to correctly measure the Chernobyl disaster's effects on the country's population and ecosystem.
>>One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.
The other posters mentioned the trade-off, or people die in plane crashes but many more would have died had they taken the car. Power needs to be generated one way or another...
Also, can we agree that the Chernobyl plant's design and management might have been lacking? New models are much safer.
Hehe. Discovery channel? I would rather trust Soviet lies.
Of course Soviet lied to cover up but i believe there was also symmetric campaign to exagerrate impact o Chernobyl.
And the very hbo series is going to be rather scary propaganda.
I read a lot on topic.
After Chernobyl ca half a million people were relocated. Most of it just for psychical comfort as there was no risk involved.
Exactly this, the numbers of casualties and description post disaster and the heroics during the disaster are not corroborated by the data.
Given the secrecy of the old Soviet system about such "embarassing" events I doubt we'll ever know exactly how many people died but the massive casualty rates that get casually flicked around make for a good story but aren't supported by any external documents at all. Perhaps we'll find a mass grave somewhere full of radioactive bodies of dead workers but barring that, most data based consensus puts the total death toll from all radiation effects at less than 1,000 and usually less than 100. But even that brings out the challenge right? So if person dies because they fell off an earth mover that was building an earthen berm to shield an area, that is clearly a death, it wasn't due to radiation and it could have happened on any worksite (like building a levy) but happened because this person was working at this disaster, does that count? Do you see how it gets complicated?
What is perhaps most interesting about the exclusion zone has been how effective it has been at recovering its natural state. It it certainly not a "radioactive wasteland" and there are numerous reports of people hunting (and eating) some of the now abundant wildlife there. It isn't the picture "post nuclear disaster" that most people have been given.
> Perhaps we'll find a mass grave somewhere full of radioactive bodies of dead workers but barring that, most data based consensus puts the total death toll from all radiation effects at less than 1,000 and usually less than 100.
The problem is that to this day we struggle to fully understand the effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure because figuring those out usually requires long-term epidemiological studies, which are expensive and complex [0]
Okay. I'm trying to understand the "low level radiation" part though. What is disappointing about the study you reference is that they don't characterize what the level of radiation is compared to normal background radiation, they don't account for changes in population or diet, and they don't account for changes in industry.
As the study itself states: "These conclusions are regrettable because low statistical significance only means that chance has not been excluded as an explanation, assuming no bias and no real effect. In more detail, p values -that is, the probabilities that observed effects may be due to chance - are affected by both the magnitude of the effect and the size of the study. This means the results of statistical tests must be interpreted with caution [26]."
Meta studies based on statistical analysis is inherently challenged. This one is no better (and no worse) than the others.
"Whatever the final explanation for the increases, the KiKK study and its implications raise many questions, including whether vulnerable people, such as pregnant women and women of child-bearing age, should be advised on possible risks of living near nuclear power stations."
and:
"It is recommended that US regulatory agencies should establish a KiKK-style epidemiological study of cancer incidences near all US nuclear power stations with precise distances being measured between cancer cases and nuclear reactors."
The point here is that our understanding of these impacts is obviously not as complete as many people like to pretend.
I don't disagree, and that same text is also in various meta studies about Cell phone towers causing cancer. And it is the problem in general with statistics based meta studies which where lampooned in XKCD[1] and lamented by the American Council on Science and Health[2]. The summary bit might be "These studies point to areas that should be looked at but offer neither hypothesis or prediction and thus not 'science' so much as they are an early investigative technique."
If nuclear plants caused childhood cancers, then they ALL would cause childhood cancers, so a scientific study would say "This mechanism, when present, has this effect. Here is our experiment to prove that, here are the results of the proof. We predict that if you look anywhere else where this mechanism is present you will see the same results."
If low level radiation did cause childhood leukemia then there would be clusters in Arvada Colorado and Moab Utah. But there aren't. So why not? When the science is done, and the other variables eliminated, to date there is no study that links low level ionizing radiation to any harmful effect on humans. Even using that term is difficult because there is alpha, beta, and gamma radiation based on electrons, protons, and neutrons. Only Gamma radiation has any sort of penetrating capability at all.
So without the science, this study means nothing. Now if they can follow up with core samples, air samples, water samples, and food products to see if there are any nuclear fission byproducts getting into the area around the plant that would be good science.
> there is no study that links low level ionizing radiation to any harmful effect on humans
This does not mean much. The direct destruction effect of strong radiation on cells is cumulative, the longer you're exposed, the greater harm done. Given the physics and biology knowledge, our best bet so far is that effect of weak but extraordinary radiation is cumulative as well. It will increase probability of cancer and leukaemia.
Alpha radiation is lethal too if you get its source into your body.
"The direct destruction effect of strong radiation on cells is cumulative, the longer you're exposed, the greater harm done."
This statement is not actually true in the general case, and that is part of the problem. It, like many others involving the effect of radiation on people, originated in the late 50's when there was little data and it was difficult to experiment. A great article on that is here (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...) but in a nutshell, the more we learn about DNA the more we discover that having evolved in a "low level radiation" environment it does a really good job of completely repairing/eradicating the damage done by low to moderate levels of radiation.
That does not say you can't get more harm faster than your DNA can fix it, which clearly you can. But the level where the damage is "cumulative" (aka permanent) is much much higher than we previously estimated based on our limited data.
Given modern tissue engineering it is conceivable could could actually do some solid experimental work in the field with a tunable radiation source and a set of growing tissue samples. Nobody has done that yet that I can find (I don't have access to a wide variety of journals in Biology that I do in some of the other sciences) but if they are please post their research here.
You've got some points on regeneration, but notice I wrote strong radiation. For weak radiation the issue is complicated, the effects develop over decades. Of course LNT model is under legitimate suspicion due to regenerative capabilities but LNT model is just about probability of cancer. It does not take into account other effects of radiation. The survivors of Chernobyl suffer different harms, for example one interview I read recently reported one survivor of high doses having to go for regular skin transplants. The radiation health effects are complex and the whole issue is just far more complicated than the Forbes biased opinion piece claims (although it does make a good point of taking the immediate death toll in perspective).
It does in the context of places, like those mentioned above, with naturally elevated levels of background radiation. The absence of studies out of these areas with links to harmful health effects is evidence that such levels are likely safe.
Again, absence of evidence does not mean much. Nobody is expecting the workers to fall down after minutes of work there, the effects of low level radiation are subtle but given the known mechanism or damage there is no basis for calling such levels safe. Workers working with radioactive tailings may suffer harmful long-term effects. But it is hard to causally connect old age health issues with presence in these areas decades ago. You cannot conclude "likely safe" from absence of information or because the workers seem fine. You would have to do the studies, which as you say, probably were not made.
> The absence of studies out of these areas with links to harmful health effects is evidence that such levels are likely safe.
That's such an odd wording, making it sound like there's only an absence of studies showing harmful health effects. When in actuality there's an absence of studies, period.
That's why the commentary about the German KiKK study suggests also conducting such studies in the US. If those were already a thing, then there'd be no reason to suggest conducting them?
Not really; there’s always constant low level radiation exposure in our day to day from background radiation. It goes up tremendously when you eat a banana a day. It goes up another few orders of magnitude when you get on a plane. We’ve got a huge corpus of constantly irradiated people (flight attendants and pilots). We’ve got a pretty good idea of how this works.
You miss the point. Studies on low level radiation effects study, for example, deviations from the linear model, but are so far inconclusive, because it is hard to prescribe and control the level of radiation over such a long time. It could be done in lab, but who would subject themselves willingly to regular blasts of radiation? Radiation intensity in planes varies a lot, depending on the height, time of flight, geographical location, etc., so little can be inferred. It would take decades and lots of volunteers willing to get harmed in the name of science to do such studies reliably. Do you know of any such study?
> It's just good when making specific claims for those claims to be substantiated.
After watching the Chernobyl miniseries last week, I dug deep into Wikipedia articles related to the accident. One thing I found interesting was the following: to empty the bubbler pools, three men dived below to reactor to open valves: Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov and Boris Baranov. In western media, it was reported that as soon as they emerged from the water, they were told it was a suicide mission and they died a few days later, implying of course that the Soviet Union knowingly send them to death.
However, according to Wikipedia:
> Research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of Chernobyl 01:23:40, determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry [...]. While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure. [0]
This is a great reminder that propaganda always happens on both sides.
For a better-researched, well-sourced and grounded write-up of a visit to Chernobyl — with tons of background on the incident itself — see Andrew Leatherbarrow's Chernobyl 01:23:40, which is available as a blog as well as an e-book:
Knowing many Belarusians, they recommend reading book by Aleksievich which is a written down summary of 500 individual discussions with first hand eye witnesses/victims of the event.
Estimates seem to vary wildly — which makes sense given the variety of agents and agendas. It's not really fair to hammer him on facts without acknowledging that the ground truth is far from certain.
Heck, even your fourth citation writes:
> Figures for the number of liquidators involved vary greatly from several hundred thousand to nearly a million people. It is likely that at least 300,000 – 350,000 people were directly involved. A report by the Nuclear Energy Agency quotes a figure “up to 800,000”. The International Conference “One Decade After Chernobyl” refers to “about 200,000 ‘liquidators’ who worked in Chernobyl during the period 1986-1987 and estimating the total number of people registered as involved in activities relating to alleviating the consequences of the accident at between 600,000 to 800,000.
You seem to have cherry picked sources that have a lower estimate for all these figures, i.e., "propaganda numbers".
I think the best source for these numbers is the Wikipedia article "Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster" [1]. From the article, Russia claims "estimates ranging from 4,000" while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000". It's clear that Russia wants to downplay the enormous human and environmental toll this has had and will continue to have.
While later contested, it's not only "Russia" which estimated 4000 deaths. Wikipedia states the United Nations took part in the joint group, and
> "[...] worked to establish international consensus on the effects of the accident via a series of reports that collated 20 years of research to make official previous UN, IAEA, and World Health Organization (WHO) estimates of a total of 4,000 deaths due to disaster-related illnesses."
In fact, the sentence you quoted states:
> "[...] there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of deaths due to the disaster's long-term health effects, with estimates ranging from 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia), to no fewer than 93,000 (per the conflicting conclusions of various scientific, health, environmental, and survivors' organizations)."
I think it's important the keep the hyperbole to a minimum, if we're truly interested in safe energy and in understanding this accident and its impact. Speaking of millions of deaths, as if it were proven fact, or getting our knowledge from sensationalized miniseries, is doing a disservice to both the Chernobyl disaster and the topic of nuclear energy.
Taking in mind that the human population living in the area has sinked, and that Prypiat has been a ghost town eating money for 33 years, I can understand the general lack of enthusiasm for repeating the Chernobyl experience at home.
How many Chernobyls would it take to equal the damage that is already inevitable from global warming? That's a serious question. It can be answered by comparing number of deaths, number of people displaced, or economic and political disruption, but no matter how you calculate the answer, the result is that Chernobyl is a tiny event by comparison.
Given the extent of tourism into the exclusion zone (myself visiting Prypiat in 2017), I wouldn't be surprised if the town itself actually made money and if (excluding opportunity cost and the costs of Sarcophagus) the whole Zone was net-profitable now.
This includes destroying trust in Ukrainian agriculture for 30 years and removing also a good chunk of lands suitable for agriculture in a country previously called "The Breadbasket of Europe (and soviet countries)".
I would expect also huge maintenance bills for a long time. The cost of the new sarcophagous and auxiliary buildings is estimated in 2.3 Billion dollars extra.
Plus increase of health services and cancer surveillance checks in nations affected by the disaster (like Ukranie, Belarus or Russia, but also Polland or Germany). Belarus registered a x40 increase in children's thyroid cancers since the accident.
Ukraine and Belarus still need to spend more than 5% of its annual budget in benefit payments to compensate 7 million people for the accident. In whole, Belarus pays around $1 million at day for Chernobyl
Plus the cost of vigillance of the restricted area to avoid garbage collectors (if not, mafias could load trucks with free metal scraps and sell it in Moscow, Berlin or Paris for example), or keeping unauthorized adventurers from doing stupid things.
Plus the cost of the damaged nuclear central itself that lose a quarter of its planned energy production for 15 years and is not producing any energy since the year 2000; only debts.
Taking all of this in mind, As thematic park and bussiness, Chernobyl is a ruinous one. Is a nice continental nature park, the first in the world, but apart of that is a ruinous adventure.
We shouldn't contrast fossil to nuclear energy but both to renewables.
In other words, stop burning things to get energy, for fossil energy because of the carbon dioxide and for nuclear energy because long-term storage of wastes is an unsolved problem. I am surprised again and again that people propose nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. Don't they know we will come out of the frying pan into the fire with nuclear energy? Enough said.
Edit: I should not have been so inflammatory, sorry for that. So let me retry:
We shouldn't contrast fossil to nuclear energy but both to renewables. We really should go out of both coal and nuclear.
In other words, stop burning non-renewable things to get energy, for fossil energy because of the carbon dioxide and for nuclear energy because of the long-term storage of waste.
There are all sort of statistical outliers when looking at cancer rates around the rest of Europe. See, for example, testicular cancer in Swiss men in 1987/1988:
> while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000".
that is on the right scale. The Gomel and Mogilev regions of Belarus took the brunt of the fallout, and the cancer rates there is significantly higher. For example, the rate of the breast cancer (the most frequent cancer - normally more than 1 in 10 women would get it during lifetime) is 2x there (so with total 1M+ women living in those 2 regions more than 100K of them would get the breast cancer due to Chernobyl). In general, comparing Belarus cancer rates to Russia, Ukraine, Poland - the surrounding countries with a lot of similarities wrt. environment, ethnicity/DNA, lifestyle/unhealthy habits/etc. - Belarus gets about 10K extra cancer cases per year (with about 50% mortality).
Belarus is different from its neighbors in more significant ways than its proximity to Chernobyl; it's famously "the last dictatorship in Europe". Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it's economy has been weaker than its neighbors, as has its ties to the European Union.
That isnt a factor here for at least two reasons: 1. It doesn't have geographical distribution correlation that the Chernobyl fallout has with the cancer rates increase. 2. The Belarus per-capita GDP is more than 2x that of Ukraine.
I believe much of that drop is due to the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, followed by the invasion of Donbass. The drop off can be seen in the link below starting in 2014 when the invasion was initiated:
You're technically correct (depending on where you find the GDP data), but I don't believe it would be the case if the invasion and annexation had not happened. The numbers prior to 2014 show Ukraine with a much higher GDP than Belarus
>The numbers prior to 2014 show Ukraine with a much higher GDP than Belarus
Not really. Even back then the Ukraine per capita was still noticeably below Belarus - having 4.5x population it had 3x GDP at best.
Anyway, my point is that the macro-economical/macro-social things like for example per-capita GDP or government style have nothing to do with cancer rates there (overwise Poland, Russia, Ukraine would have huge differences among themselves), and definitely those macro-factors dont have geographical distribution like Chernobyl fallout to explain the Belarus cancer picture.
Russia and Poland have higher rates of smoking. Anyway, it would be mostly about lung cancer which isn't the main component here.
> * The indirect impact of Chernobyl includes a lack of health care facilities in the (rural) regions most impacted.
Lack of healthcare facilities doesn't really impact cancer incidence rate.
>If the stat you're working from was breast cancer mortality, I'd push back harder, but I don't think that's what you're saying.
Breast cancer incidence rate is the main component here. It shows the largest increase in absolute terms. Thyroid cancer shows largest percentage increase, though it is "just" a 1K of cases. Geographically correlates with fallout too.
So far i really fail to see how any argument you've put forward can explain such a significant and regionally (Mogilev and Gomel are large regions, so it is not some local effect) regionally correlated increase in the cancer rate. Especially given that those regions received several Hiroshimas worth of fallout which explains that increase perfectly.
So your explanation need to be at least as good as the Chernobyl fallout provides. Specifically any such explanation has to account for the observed size of the rate increase as well as its geographical distribution, i.e. it should clearly answer - "why Gomel and Mogilev?"
>Smoking is closely linked to some forms of breast cancer.
the smoking rates among women in Belarus is ~10%. To account for the breast cancer rate increase in the Gomel and Mogilev regions all the women smokers there would have to get the breast cancer. Add to that that women smoking rate for example in Russia is close to 20% and the breast cancer rates there are relatively normal. Given all that it is pretty obvious that smoking has nothing to do with that cancer rate increase in Gomel and Mogilev regions .
Indeed. Also, stands to reason that breast cancer incidence rate is less correlated with standard of living or availability of healthcare than mortality rate. (Unless the society is so primitive that cancer mortalities don't get counted)
Poland is also a neighbor of Belarus and a former Eastern Bloc country. But I will cop to not researching this carefully; if I had the comment to write over again, I would have stopped at "last dictatorship in Europe".
I have never been to Belarus or Ukraine and have no real desire to, though Poland is pretty high on my list.
Total deaths from immediate "radiation poisoning" were likely less than 100, with possibly 100 more due to radionuclide ingestion.
Immediate DNA damage that does not result in radiation sickness, is much less lethal than popular culture suggests.
Another thing to add, the best protective equipment for nuclear disaster is a good respirator, and a chemsuit, and not the lead "x-ray suit" often portrayed in popular culture. The cause of most deaths during Chernobyl was smoke inhalation, seconded by radionuclide ingestion by people who ate contaminated meals from field kitchens.
To be clear, this didn't happen. No one said it did. There was a chance something like this could have happened (the Chernobyl miniseries does a great job of showing this). The issue was that there were large water tanks under the reactor, and that the reactor material would eventually melt into those tanks, superheat the water and cause an enormous steam explosion, further scattering radioactive materials into the atmosphere, and destroying the three other reactors at Chernobyl, scattering their material too.
That said, the idea that a 5MT explosion at Chernobyl would have levelled the city of Kiev is not particularly realistic [0]. (note that the fallout effects from Chernobyl would be much worse than from a nuclear explosion, so given winds, fallout could have made Kiev, or even Moscow, uninhabitable). And in fact, as explained elsewhere, the explosion wouldn't have been 5MT, but much smaller, although that wouldn't have mattered much for the issue of spreading radioactive material.
To be even more clear, a steam explosion cannot by any stretch of the imagination "level" a city fully two hours away. And the phrase "equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion" has no possible interpretation that squares with reality. The idea of a megaton-sized steam explosion is ludicrous, so I assume he means to imply some connection to radioactive fallout - but the amount of fallout isn't really correlated with the strength of the explosion. In fact, early fission bombs were relatively dirty while later thermonuclear bombs were relatively clean. The largest nuclear explosion ever produced was actually remarkably clean due to its unique design. So what is Moxie even talking about? It borders on incoherent, and I think you're being far too charitable.
By the way, the three men who faced "almost certain death" were certainly heroic but weren't in nearly as much danger as he plays up. All three men survived and lived for decades afterward.
See this reddit thread[0] linked elsewhere here. The issue is likely a faulty primary source, some russian official who wildly misspoke or miswrote something.
> but the amount of fallout isn't really correlated with the strength of the explosion.
It absolutely is for a similar burst condition and similar weapon technology, so it's absolutely credible that one would use, say, groundburst yield with a technology then dominant for large weapons as a reference for fallout. (And, IIRC, groundburst yield is both much greater and much less variable by nuclear bomb technology than airburst since most of the fallout is ground material with induced radioactivity while with an airburst most of the fallout is bomb material, so that technology might not even need to be significant variable using groundburst yield as a reference scale.)
While 5 megatons definitely does seem like an overestimation, I think the fear was that it was a much larger mass of molten corium, including not just the fuel itself, but also molten silicon and lead, from the material dumped on the exposed reactor to quench the fires and prevent fallout. There was an estimated 5000 tons of this suppressant material, although I don't know how much could have reasonably been expected to melt (and I think later analysis shows that very little of it actually landed on the exposed core itself.)
Then when the molten corium hits the water, the water could act as a neutron moderator for a runaway fission reaction. You have to think this would be more a nuclear "fizzle" than the prompt criticality that is necessary for a >10kt (let alone megaton) bomb, but it would still be bad.
A 5 megaton explosion that levels Kiev? Probably not, but then again I'm not the nuclear physicist who came up with that number.
The idea that blowing the core material into the atmosphere and causing further meltdowns in the other three reactors would be a major radiological disaster for Northern Europe, though, I can appreciate.
The largest ever fission explosion was, IIRC, something like a few hundred kT. It's just physically impossible to have a bigger yield from fission alone, as the bomb assembly blows apart before it has time to fission. And this was from a carefully designed weapon, not a reactor fueled with LEU melting. So yes, 5 MT is pure fantasy with absolutely no connection to reality.
As for prompt criticality, in a weapon the neutron multiplication time is around a million times faster than in a prompt criticality transient in a thermal neutron reactor. That's what allows a weapon to have any significant yield before it disintegrates.
The worst case scenario is still orders of magnitude less than "5 megaton explosion". Somebody's math was wrong, or lost in translation. Either the math was done wrong, not done at all, or the figures got messed up in translation.
>>What about the people who knowingly sacrificed themselves to stop a reaction that would have destroyed most of Europe?
If he is talking about those 3 people who went to drain the pool under the reactor - none of them died. I think they are all still alive to this day, at least they were the last time I checked.
“Research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of Chernobyl 01:23:40,[81] determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry, and rebuffs the growth of the Chernobyl media sensationalism surrounding him.[88] While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive by Leatherbarrow, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure.”
I don't think this is a fair assessment. First of all you've ignored the most significant claims, that Chernobyl was very nearly a much worse disaster that "would have leveled Kiev and Minsk, and would have ejected the nuclear material from the other 3 Chernobyl reactors with a force that would have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of years." Or it nearly irradiated "groundwater for 50 million people" or that 50,000 people "were given 2 hours to pack whatever they could carry and get on a bus" and never come back.
On these points alone it would be inaccurate to say "much" of his data is "wrong" -- that's most of the data data right there and it is unchallenged.
Instead you've focused on whether it was 600K or merely 300K liquidators, or whether the 600 pilots were "registered" killed or merely suspected. These are relatively minor points (compared to ending large swaths of civilization) and even your own sources note that the figures are controversial and give ranges. While I would agree that Marlinspike has favored the worst case end of the spectrum here and his piece ought to cite sources, I think you have misrepresented the certainty of the evidence.
I don't mean any of this to lessen the enormity of what happened and the tremendous, noble effort made by the liquidators to remediate what was there at great personal cost. It's just good when making specific claims for those claims to be substantiated.
[1] https://www.rotorandwing.com/2016/04/26/chernobyl-anniversar...
[2] http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Chernobyl_pilots_knew_risk...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-04-mn-106-st...
[4] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/liquidato...