Let's keep Chernobyl in perspective

Some 5 million people lived in the immediately affected area of the Ukraine, but all Europe became paralyzed by fear as hourly news reports tracked the radioactive cloud across the continent. Estimates at the time were of “tens of thousands” of lives lost, and pregnant mothers from Sweden to Italy underwent abortions for fear that their babies would be born with radiation-induced abnormalities…

Any loss of life, particularly among children, is tragic. But clearly the mass causalities that were almost universally predicted – not just by the newshounds, but by the many “experts” who commented at the time – have not materialized. “By and large,” the report concludes, “we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health…”

It is worth putting even the UN’s low casualty figures in perspective. As the report notes, over 1,000 onsite reactor staff and emergency workers received heavy exposure to high levels of radiation on the first day of the accident, and some 200,000 workers were exposed in recovery operations from 1986-1987. But only 50 had died of cancer 20 years later.

Exposed children are more at risk from thyroid cancer, but the recovery rate – even in the Soviet Ukraine – was 99 percent. The health experts could find no evidence of increased rates of leukemia or other cancers among the affected residents.