Nailed: the lie about Chernobyl's death toll

comment, 25 April 2006

The message was pretty clear. "Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident" was the headline. "UN report provides definitive answers" said the subheading. And then, the opening paragraph:

"A total of up to four thousand people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded."

Only one problem: it wasn't true.

The news release, as it was meant to, made headlines around the world after it was published on 5 September 2005. It was from a clutch of United Nations organisations, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

But over the last few weeks - in the run-up to Chernobyl's twentieth anniversary on 26 April - it has been thoroughly discredited. A report by two independent radiation scientists, Ian Fairlie and David Sumner, said the global death toll from cancers was actually going to be between 30,000 and 60,000.

They pointed out that the UN report had only counted cancers deaths from the most contaminated parts of the three nearest countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. It had omitted deaths in the less contaminated areas of these countries, and from the rest of Europe and the world. This was odd, to say the least, especially as the majority of the radioactivity actually fell outwith those three countries.

A series of other studies since have come up with similarly high, or higher, numbers. The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, published a study which put the cancer death toll in Europe at "about 16,000" - or, allowing for the uncertainties, somewhere between 6,700 and 38,000.

The environmental group, Greenpeace, released a report quoting Russian scientists suggesting that radiation from Chernobyl could kill as many as 90,000. And the European Committee of Radiation Risk published a book by Chris Busby and Alexey Yablokov claiming "millions" of cancer deaths.

Critically, WHO itself issued a new statement. "WHO," it said, "estimates there may be up to 9,000 excess cancer deaths due to Chernobyl among the people who worked on the clean-up operations, evacuees and residents of the highly and lower-contaminated regions in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine."

In an associated fact sheet, WHO also accepted that the radiation released would cause cancers in other parts of Europe. But it declined to estimate numbers, saying merely that predictions are "very uncertain".

WHO, in other words, has effectively disowned 4,000 as a headline figure. Even the IAEA, whose mission is to promote nuclear power, has wobbled a little. Put on the spot, the IAEA argued that the total of 4,000 deaths was highlighted to counter much higher figures claimed earlier by some.

"It was a bold action to put out a new figure that was much less than conventional wisdom," an IAEA spokeswoman reportedly said.

"Bold" is one way of putting it. "Economical with the truth" would be another. Who knows exactly what international politicking went on behind the scenes between the IAEA and the WHO over the wording of last September's misleading news release. But it looks like the IAEA, a much more powerful organisation than WHO within the UN, called the shots.

The IAEA spin doctors must have been proud of their work when the stories spread across the world's media stressing how few deaths Chernobyl had caused. But now it has all been undone.

We will probably never know for sure how many people will be killed by the world's worst nuclear accident, but we can be sure of one thing. It's going to be a hell of a lot more than 4,000.

Comments

[Richard Bramhall]

This seems to imply that we're all cosily agreeing except for minor differences of opinion. This isn't the case. The Low Level Radiation Campaign has roundly criticised the Fairlie / Sumner report as unduly theoretical and highly selective. See http://www.llrc.org/health/subtopic/fairliechernobyl.htm
The point is that their apparently large numbers are derived from nitpicking over the "source term" (amount of radiation people were exposed to) which the nukes will cheerfully dicker about 'til Kingdom come because it can never be resolved. The risk factors they have applied to their version of the source term in order to calculate expected deaths are entirely conventional, and they have seriously under-reported the state of the scientific debate about radiation "dose"; so the nukes will be happy about that too. And, as Rob's Cardis quote says, even the upper estimate of 60,000 won't be visible against the background noise of spontaneous disease rates; yet another reason for the nukes to rejoice.
Fairlie and Sumner's reading list omits important and recent material though it includes stuff they admit is out of print and out of date! They also admit they haven't looked at evidence from the ex-Soviet Union territories. On the other hand the ECRR has gone to enormous trouble and expense to translate and synopsise hard evidence (250 pages of it). Let no-one think that the ECRR's reticence about making specific predictions as to numbers of dead bodies is a weakness or an indication that they're just arm-waving. Now that the concept of dose is seen to be inapplicable to the types of exposure involved in reactor disasters (as even ICRP has admitted), we must accept that dose-based calculations confer a merely spurious precision. We don't know what will happen. This is all a ghastly experiment. Let's make sure we learn the lessons.
Richard Bramhall, LLRC

[Dr David Lowry]

Rob

Truth will out.. with the aid of honest investigative reporters. Much appreciated. Keep sleuthing.

David