Japan nuclear crisis ignites talk of Chernobyl comparisons


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SALT LAKE CITY -- Japan's nuclear crisis is being compared more and more to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and Chernobyl, in turn, is being used as an argument against nuclear power. But in Utah, there are charges that the debate has turned to fear-mongering instead of real science.

No one disputes that the Soviet Union's 1986 Chernobyl accident was bad -- very bad. But did it kill a million people, or just a few thousand? That's one major dispute boiling out of the crisis in Japan.

The dispute was touched off by Dr. Brian Moench of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, who published a comment piece in the Salt Lake Tribune with a frightening claim: "A million people from around the world have already died from Chernobyl radiation," Moench wrote, basing that claim on estimates by three Russian scientists. Moench argued that the incident in Japan should "portend the death knell to a nuclear power renaissance."

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Click to enlarge

In a later interview Moench said, "Well, I think that this (crisis in Japan) indicates there is certainly legitimate dispute as to how safe the whole nuclear industry is."

Radiobiologist Scott Miller, a research professor at the University of Utah, calls the million-death figure for Chernobyl "a complete fabrication." Miller said, "My reaction is, that's a made-up number."

Miller has traveled to the former Soviet Union 20 times over the last two decades, directing radiation studies at contaminated sites.

Pinning down the death toll to a specific number is an essentially impossible task. The best scientists can do is estimate the number of people who died or may die in the future, from cancers attributable to radiation exposure. That task is complicated by the fact that many people would have died anyway; radiation may elevate the risk of cancer, but cancers can be caused by many other environmental and life-style factors.

Miller said 11,000 industrial facilities in the Chernobyl region in the 1980s emitted unhealthy levels of toxic chemicals. He also noted that people living in the region are heavy users of tobacco and alcohol.

"Even if we take highly-exposed Russian nuclear workers that have been exposed to, say, plutonium, (which is) extremely carcinogenic," Miller said, "if they smoke, they're five times more likely to die from their smoking than they are from their radiation exposures."

Many thousands of residents have simply died of natural causes over the years as they have grown into their 60s and 70s in a nation with a poor life expectancy.

It's beyond dispute that several dozen people died at Chernobyl from acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident in 1986, but estimates over time vary widely.
It's beyond dispute that several dozen people died at Chernobyl from acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident in 1986, but estimates over time vary widely.

Miller believes the true death toll from Chernobyl-related cancers is probably a few thousand, not a million as some have claimed.

"It's kind of like saying the Civil War caused the death of every American, because we have no current survivors from the Civil War," Miller said. "Therefore, the Civil War must have caused everyone to die."

Moench says policymakers should not accept optimistic estimates because they might turn out to be wrong.

"And maybe," Moench said, "if we use the precautionary principle, which is we should try and make sure that our public policy isn't hurting anybody, then maybe that obligates us to actually give greater weight to the most pessimistic of the evaluations."

It's beyond dispute that several dozen people died at Chernobyl from acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident in 1986. Several thousand children were diagnosed with thyroid cancer, but nearly all of the thyroid cases were treated and the children survived. Estimates vary widely as to the number of cancer deaths in the ensuing years and those expected in the future.

In 2005, the World Health Organization estimated the eventual death toll at 4,000. That estimate was later revised to about 9,000. The environmental group Greenpeace put the number at 200,000. The estimate of a million deaths came from Russian scientist Alexey Yablokov and Alexey Nesterenko and Vassily Nesterenko of Belarus. They reviewed 5,000 previous studies and published their work online without peer review. It was later re-published by the New York Academy of Sciences.

"It's done by, as far as we can tell, the scientists who have the most familiarity with it," Moench said. "If there's a reasonable chance that this is correct, it certainly ought to influence public policy."

But Miller questions the expertise and possible biases of the three scientists who published the estimate. "It's good to have the discussion," Miller said, "but it's wrong to be fear-mongering."

Moench says to protect the public, policymakers ought to accept the most pessimistic reputable estimate, but Miller says a million deaths is not justified by the facts.

E-mail: hollenhorst@ksl.com

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