Replies

-—————Tell that to the parents of the children who developed cancer.

Ah, yes, the children. The magical touchstone of "it doesn't matter what we have to do and how many people it harms if it will save the life of one child."

How about all the parents whose children were harmed because of unnecessarily evacuating tens of thousands of people from the surrounding region? Besides, there wasn't an increase in childhood cancer deaths from Chernobyl. You'll notice that there was screening 2 to 4 years post-Chernobyl for thyroid cancer that showed an increase but that was due to intensive screening detecting what would always have been there but not diagnosed for one reason or another. Also, the latency period for developing thyroid cancer from such a cause is 10 years, so screening 2 to 4 years after the incident would not have spotted the cancers from this cause. Look at what was actually discovered over the decades since Chernobyl versus what the fear-mongers were hyping at the time. Follow the links I posted to the UNSCEAR report fielded by Z. Jawoworski.

The human tragedy of Chernobyl was caused, not by Chernobyl, but by the activists promoting government action where none was needed:

Besides the 28 fatalities among rescue workers and employees of the power station due to very high doses of radiation (2.9 – 16 Gy), and 3 deaths due to other reasons (UNSCEAR 2000b), the only real adverse health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe among approximately five million people living in the contaminated regions were the epidemics of psychosomatic afflictions that appear as diseases of the digestive and circulatory systems and other post-traumatic stress disorders such as sleep disturbance, headache, depression, anxiety, escapism, “learned helplessness”, unwillingness to cooperate, overdependence, alcohol and drug abuse and suicides. These diseases and disturbances could not have been due to the minute irradiation doses from the Chernobyl fallout (average dose rate of about 1 – 2 mSv/year), but they were caused by radiophobia (an deliberately induced fear of radiation) aggravated by wrongheaded administrative decisions and even, paradoxically, by increased medical attention which leads to diagnosis of subclinical changes that persistently hold the attention of the patient. Bad administrative decisions made several million people believe that they were “victims of Chernobyl” although the average annual dose they received from “Chernobyl” radiation was only about one third of the average natural dose. This was the main factor responsible for the economic losses caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe, estimated to have reached $148 billion by 2000 for the Ukraine and to reach $235 billion by 2016 for Belarus.
Observations on the Chernobyl Disaster and LNT