Report: Chernobyl Toll Could Top 90K
The environmental watchdog group Greenpeace said Tuesday in a report that more than 90,000 people were likely to die of cancers caused by radiation from the Chernobyl explosion, sharply challenging a U.N. report that predicted the death toll would be around 4,000.
The report's conclusion underlines the uncertainty that remains about the health effects of the world's worst nuclear accident as its 20th anniversary approaches.
A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded on April 26, 1986, spewing heavy levels of radioactive fallout over much of Europe. The fallout was particularly severe in northern reaches of Ukraine, western Russia and in much of Belarus.
Areas immediately around the now-inoperative plant remain off-limits. But other areas that got significant fallout are inhabited, and health anxiety is common in those areas.
A report by the Chernobyl Forum, which comprises the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency and several other U.N. groups said last year that only 56 deaths could be confirmed as being connected to Chernobyl and that the number of deaths connected with the accident ultimately would probably be around 4,000.
But Greenpeace, in a report citing data from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine — and extrapolating from those figures — disagreed and suggested the Chernobyl Forum report was deliberately misleading.
"It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious nuclear accident in human history," Ivan Blokov of Greenpeace's Russia office said in a statement. "Denying the real implications is not only insulting to the thousands of victims but it also leads to dangerous recommendations and the relocation of people in contaminated areas."
The Chernobyl Forum report had suggested that many of the health problems and complaints in the regions around Chernobyl were connected with unhealthy lifestyles such as heavy drinking and smoking and with a culture of victimization.
Greenpeace countered that statistics from Belarus indicate there will be 270,000 cases of cancer attributable to Chernobyl radiation throughout the region — and that 93,000 of those cases are likely to be fatal.
Greenpeace also cited a report by Veniamin Khudolei of the Center for Independent Environmental Assessment of the Russian Academy of Sciences that found sharply increased mortality in western Russia over the past 15 years, suggesting that the increase was due to Chernobyl radiation.
"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 finds 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."