Chernobyl Toll May One Day Surpass 90K

[IronLionZion]

http://tinyurl.com/hrpzb

By MARA D. BELLABY, Associated Press Writer

KIEV, Ukraine - Greenpeace said Tuesday in a new report that more than 90,000 people were likely to die of cancers caused by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, countering a United Nations report that predicted the death toll would be around 4,000.

Greenpeace said statistics from Belarus indicate that 270,000 cases of cancer will be attributable to Chernobyl radiation throughout the region and that 93,000 of those are likely to be fatal.

"On the basis of demographic data, during the last 15 years, 60,000 people have died additionally in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident and estimates of the total death toll for Ukraine and Belarus could be another 140,000," Greenpeace's international office said in a statement.

The report also found that "radiation from the disaster has had a devastating effect on survivors" other than cancer cases — "damaging immune and endocrine systems, leading to accelerated aging, cardiovascular and blood illnesses, psychological illnesses, chromosome aberrations and an increase of deformities in fetuses and children."

Dying slowly from cancer is considerably more "sexy" than dying quickly in a coal mine. I don't know of anyone dying from wind or solar though. And a lot of good people died because of big dams.

I expect the biggest number of fatalities are coming from global climate change real soon.

[Peanutcat]

1. Die from what?

Because of the climate change?

[NNadir]

2. Why do you suppose you don't know of anyone dying of wind or solar?

Could it be that you're not looking?

Could it be that the amount of energy produced from solar or wind is so tiny, that no one notices its environmental effects?

[IronLionZion]

19. I know for a fact that YOU are looking

because you are shamelessly pro-nuclear. But no, I haven't seen any posts about anyone dying from wind or solar yet.

Air pollution from coal definitely sucks big time. No one would deny that.

But if you want to talk about amount of energy produced, then why is coal producing half our power while nuclear is only about 20%? :shrug: Energy companies don't give a shit what you or I think. If nuclear is so good then why not use it more?

[struggle4progress]

3. "Medvedev has cited the entire range of estimates for cancer death ..

.. estimates that have been made. The lowest estimates are 200 to 600 additional cancer deaths in the former Soviet Union, while the highest estimate is 280,000 additional cancer fatalities worldwide.

These estimates do not include adverse health effects on workers and soldiers who were the clean-up crews and hence among the most severely affected. There are no systematic records of their exposure or even of how many of them were involved. Medvedev quotes an eyewitness account of the working conditions of the soldiers who did the clean-up work in the immediate aftermath of the accident:

I saw soldiers and officers picking up graphite with their hands...There was graphite lying around everywhere, even behind the fence next to our car. I opened the door and pushed the radiometer almost onto a graphite block. Two thousands of roentgens an hour...Having filled their buckets, the soldiers seemed to walk very slowly to the metal containers where they poured out the contents, You poor dears, I thought, what an awful harvest you are gathering...

The faces of the soldiers and officers were dark brown: nuclear tan.229

Medvedev estimates that the radiation tan on the soldiers' faces indicates skin doses of 400 to 500 rem, that many of them suffered from acute exposures, and that some died as a result. No records have been kept, or at any rate, made public, of the numbers of soldiers involved in such activities or of their exposures."

http://www.ieer.org/reports/npd7.html


Meaningful epidemiological study of Chernobyl's consequences is difficult because adequate records generally do not exist ...

[NNadir]

4. By anecdote, the anti-nuclear people claim everyone in the Ukraine died.

It's mostly because they make stuff up.

But if we take the upper made up number, 280,000, for a reactor type no longer being built, we see this is an annual rate of 14,000 per year, world wide from nuclear power, easily dwarfed by the 4 million who die from air pollution.

[phantom power]

8. Wouldn't it be "better" to compare deaths-per-exajoule?

I don't think it changes the conclusion much, but something like deaths per exajoule produced by fossil fuels (pick a starting date, I guess) against deaths per exajoule produced by nuclear power, would be enlightening.

Or maybe that DALY measure is better than "deaths"

Of course, if we consider the next 50 years, fossil fuels are likely to have another billion or so deaths added to their tally. More, if you think the way I do.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Sadly, I do think the way you do...

However, from here:

Fossil fuels:
7,669,958 GWh = 27.61 EJ
Deaths: 700,000 (from the Humanist article, probably a minimum number)
~25,000 Deaths/EJ

Nuclear:
2,167,515 GWh = 7.8 EJ
Deaths... well, there's the question. But it would need to be ~200,000 per year to match fossil fuels, and even in the cataclysmic wet dreams of Greenpeace the number doesn't reach that.

NB - the figures are for electricity, not primary power, which is why they're so low. They're also from 1993, but I'm guessing the ratio is about the same.

[NNadir]

11. In theory, yes.

However, the "cause" of death is inherently statistical.

Ukraine and Belarus for instance, are areas in which there are many environmental insults besides Chernobyl.

Greenpeace wants to present a case where all excess deaths are, of course, attributable to Chernobyl, just as people like me tend to minimize the role Chernobyl deaths.

How do we count the dead in Iraq, where the war is related to fossil fuels?

How do we count the deaths from poverty, where some of the deaths are certainly attributable to there being no energy?

How do we count the deaths attributable to people demanding (irrationally, I think) that billions of dollars be spent to eliminate two or three deaths over a century from spent nuclear fuel, leaving nothing to spend on health care of millions that could save hundreds of thousands of lives per year.

I am certain that if we applied the unit you suggest, nuclear would win the argument hands down.

I note that the externe project I continuously reference here is exactly the type of process you suggest; it is in fact the best representation of the case. Thus on some level, it already exists, but people don't pay attention to it.

[depakid]

16. DALY's and ionizing radiation

Here's how the WHO does the global disease burden assessment:

http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/research/en/GBD4web.pdf

15 slides, very straightforward bullets, equations, charts & graphs.

Once you've standardized to DALY's, you can make reasonable comparisons to other things, like non-malignant respiratory disease due to occupational airborne exposures:

http://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/global/4airbornexposure.pdf

I don't think anyone's ever looked at the disease burden in terms of exajoules. Could be there's nice paper in that for you guys!

[struggle4progress]

13. Never heard this claim. Gotta link?

[Dead_Parrot]

15. Start here:

link :)

[depakid]

5. Looks to me like Greenpeace is way off the mark here

And in any case it's really hard to estimate attributable risks for excess mortality due to the radiation exposure- for a variety of reasons that both the WHO and the Chernobyl Forum Reports talk about. Even the 9,000 figure's sketchy.

In terms of DALY's (disability-adjusted life years) the usual measures for time lived with a disability and the time lost due to premature mortality, I'd bet the social and mental health consequences of the accident will have a much greater public health impact than radiation exposure.

Laypersons often underestimate those effects, but in fact they're powerful predictors of future health.

A couple of quick examples:

From the WHO report:

Evacuation and relocation proved a deeply traumatic experience to many people because of the disruption to social networks and having no possibility to return to their homes. For many there was a social stigma associated with being an "exposed person".

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html

From the Chernobyl Forum:

"As noted in the Chernobyl Forum report on Health, “the mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date.” Psychological distress arising from the accident and its aftermath has had a profound impact on individual and community behaviour.

Populations in the affected areas exhibit strongly negative attitudes in self-assessments of health and wellbeing and a strong sense of lack of control over their own lives. Associated with these perceptions is an exaggerated sense of the dangers to health of exposure to radiation.

The affected populations exhibit a widespread belief that exposed people are in some way condemned to a shorter life expectancy. Such fatalism is also linked to a loss of initiative to solve the problems of sustaining an income and to dependency on assistance from the state.

Anxiety over the effects of radiation on health shows no sign of diminishing. Indeed, it may even be spreading beyond the affected areas into a wide section of the population. Parents may be transferring their anxiety to their children through example and excessively protective care."

http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

These are mostly unique to nuclear power- people have a fear reaction that's been cultivated over years and years of associations. It's going to take a lot of educational campaigning for the nuclear industry to overcome it here in this country- and considering the lack of trust in the former Soviet Union, I don't know what if anything can realistically be done to help the people who were in or near the the areas that got dosed.

[Oerdin]

17. Who to trust.

Do we trust scientists and medical professionals at the World Health Organization or do we trust ideologues at Green Peace? I know which group I have more faith in.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Where is the Greenpeace report?

I had to go looking for it, and I think I found it:
http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/chernobylhealthreport.pdf
(It was linked from http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406)

Is this the right one? I read it, and I would like to discuss it, but I am not sure that it's the right report.

Here's the WHO report that they take issue with:
http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

7. I'm guessing it's the right one

I'll grab some more coffee and have a proper read. Although a 2 minute flick through makes me a bit suspicious - on page 76 they seem to discuss how radiation gave people herpes, which is a bit of a :wtf: moment...

[Dogmudgeon]

9. Nuclear Herpes -- and an Unreadable Paper

I can vouch for Nuclear Herpes -- Herpes viruses are known to be easily activated by ionizing radiation. That would include Herpes simplex, zoster (Shingles), Chicken Pox and most Mononucleosis (caused by the Epstein-Barr herpesvirus). An earlier report also noticed an increase in herpes outbreaks among the Chernobyl workers and liquidators. (Liquidators, which you probably already have read, is the name given to the clean-up workers. We'd probably call them Nuclear Waste Remediation Engineers.)

But that's beside the point. The paper is unreadable as a work of biomedical research.

I'm through most of it and I'm convinced that it's a draft, not a final paper. I used to edit scientific papers (on a publication, not scientific, basis), and it looks like it was patched together from a couple of different drafts. It must have been released prematurely. There are so many little errors strewn throughout it that I'm amazed it made it onto the Greenpeace server. I'm not talking about the scientific material, either. For instance, the lack of citations in the first section alone has to be the result of an early draft being merged into a Word or FrameMaker document without regard for the footnotes, which are "document objects" that can easily be lost. Stuff like that. But some of the text is so alarming in tone that it can not stand without the citations, especially in the Executive Summary.

And if you're familiar with my own stuff, you know I'm not an Internet Citation Warrior. If you read that section, you'll see what I mean.

It's also impossible to transfer text for quotation using cut-and-paste; the text pastes as gibberish. I wonder how that happened; some kind of text coding error using the Clipboard in Windows? I've never come across that problem before, and I've used Acrobat since the late 1990s, and I've also been a Windows programmer since 1999, and I've never seen the Clipboard act like that.

I mean, the whole thing is a mess, and it makes it difficult to follow the substance of the paper. The scientific work -- and it is substantial -- is crippled without the supporting material. Entire chunks of the paper also appear to have been translated, presumably from Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusan. Perhaps these would be noted as quotations if the formatting had been maintained.

In any event, it's impossible to discuss it with the detail it deserves until these problems are cleared up. I do not intend to even try until they have released a readable report. Even if their publication staff has screwed up, it would be unfair to the scientists and translators who put their work into it to try to criticize and/or praise it.

I am not as cynical about Greenpeace as NNadir is, and this situation gives me no joy. Although I've come to disagree with their position on nuclear energy, I have long respected their mission. I also maintain an active interest in the issue of the risks of nuclear power, and my mind is hardly closed to considering even strongly negative evidence. But if this is the Official Report of Greenpeace -- and if they intend to stand by it as their final draft -- they are going to get whomped but good.

And as I said -- no joy. Supporters of Greenpeace should not take this as a criticism of the work done, and I am sure a great deal of work was, indeed, put into it. I would truly like to read the report when it is in final form. And it should be finished, if for no other reason than that the survivors of Chernobyl deserve any answers that the Greenpeace scientists may have found.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

12. You learn something every day...

Especially about herpes. :) Thanks...

The reason seems to be is they've used native pdf encoding, rather than iso: it's probably an honest mistake, although it does make life tricky if you want to look at it properly (I don't seem to be able to search, for instance, although that may be just me). Hopefully they'll get this fixed, sort out their quotations, take out the emotive language and, if we're really lucky, take out the references to articles written by "Anon" (there are several, and it's not impressive!)

We'll see what happens...

[struggle4progress]

14. Radiation prolongs, activates viral infections

HOUSTON -- (June 15, 2005) -- Gamma radiation can prolong viral infections and even reactivate viruses in mice, demonstrating that the effect of such exposures on the immune system will have important implications for space flight, said Baylor College of Medicine scientists working as part of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in a report in this month's issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. <snip>

http://www.bcm.edu/news/item.cfm?newsID=424

[Odin2005]

18. I don't see Greenpeace whining about deaths from coal.

In other words, they are a bunch of stupid hypocrits, fuck them.

[depakid]

20. True, but they've also been very active in climate change

over the years. In fact, Jeremy Legget worked for them for awhile. Like many "popular" groups, they're a mixed bag, lacking a coherent worldview.

Chalk it up to postmodernism, I guess.