The 25th Anniversary of Chernobyl Season is In Full Swing – It is a Good Time For Information to Counter Misinformation
The Telegraph published an article titled Chernobyl: The toxic tourist attraction that is clearly designed to play off of the upcoming (April 26) 25th anniversary of the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. The teaser for the article reinforces that assumption.
As Ukraine prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster next month, its legacy remains as divisive as ever, writes Andrew Osborn.
The article is not particularly well researched, and it includes a number of misstatements that reflect the assumptions and positions of the author rather than an informed effort to revisit an important historical event to learn the available lessons. Chernobyl happened and that is a tragedy for the people it affected, but it was also an opportunity for the world to learn some important lessons. Here is one of the comments that I made on the article in reference to a passage that occurs immediately after the lede.
The following passage should cause a person with a questioning attitude to say “huh?”
“”I absorbed a dose of radiation that should have killed me,” says the former Chernobyl engineer, his eyes welling up with tears. “I thought afterwards that it would only be a matter of time before my family had to fend for themselves.”
Now 60 and the head of an organisation representing 450,000 people affected by the tragedy, Mr Andreyev’s pessimism is understandable.”
It seems to me that Mr. Andreyev has no reason for pessimism, but he might have good justification for anger. He was told that he had received a lethal dose, but it sounds like he is doing okay almost 25 years later. If I were him, I would be angry at all of the lost sleep and worry for no apparent reason.
He probably was forcefully evacuated from his home, yet if he did some research he might find that he and his neighbors could have easily remained and prospered if just a few simple clean up steps had been taken instead.
It is not well known, but many of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still doing quite well considering the fact that their supposedly harmful doses were administered 65 years ago.
High doses of radiation are deadly and can cause very painful consequences. However, there are often many orders of magnitude of difference between those deadly high doses and the doses that fear mongers have been telling people to worry about for many years. Low doses of atomic radiation are a natural part of the earthly environment; scientific evidence collected through hundreds of studies conducted over the past 7 decades are showing that humans evolved some defense and repair mechanisms that reduce the consequences of low doses.
Some of those studies are even showing that low doses of radiation have effects that are similar to low doses of substances like niacin, thiamine, and biotin.
The dose makes the poison. The converse of that is often that low doses are not a poison, but a vitamin.
What I did not mention in that comment, but thought about right after I posted it, was the fact that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were evacuated. Both were cleaned up and restored as soon as there were sufficient resources to do so. That kind of response would have been far better for the affected populations near Chernobyl than the action that the political leaders in the Soviet Union took to disrupt and disperse the survivors. Radiation and radioactive materials are not something to be feared; they are something to be understood and properly handled.
Chernobyl should not be used as an excuse for continuing to depend on explosive and dirty fossil fuels rather than moving towards clean, safe and abundant nuclear energy. Considering the importance of selling oil and natural gas to the west to the Soviet Union’s economy at the time of the accident, it is hard for me not to suspect that there was internal political pressure applied to take actions that would inflate the accident’s publicized consequences.
The world needs to learn all of the available lessons from the accident. One lesson that the world should carry away from Chernobyl is to never again build water cooled graphite moderated reactors that do not have containment systems. However, if you already have such a device in operation, never allow it to be operated by lightly trained people supervised by a politically appointed manager under a system where operators have been trained to blindly obey orders, even if those orders violate what little knowledge they have.
And, if for some unforeseen reason you have a slightly unstable device and a crew of lightly trained operators, supervise them well enough so that they do not perform an unauthorized test late at night and put the plant into a very unstable operating condition.
In other words, the chances of repeating Chernobyl are exceedingly remote. Nuclear energy is far better than all other alternatives, even after taking Chernobyl into account. Despite the accusations of those opposing nuclear energy, all nuclear professionals are painfully aware that it happened and caused more damage to more people than it should have.
Additional Reading
Channeling the Strong Force (March 1, 2011) – Chernobyl 25th Anniversary Fear-Fest
American Nuclear Society Chernobyl information page
Yes, I posted the following in response to a scare article.
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2011/03/chernobyl-25th-anniversary-fear-fest.html
As I mentioned earlier on the Depleted Cranium blog, the only scenario where I believe a Chernobyl-type disaster could be repeated would be an illegal nuclear reactor. This could be a reactor built by terrorists to produce plutonium, or one built by criminals to sell black-market electricity in a country where electricity is very expensive and nuclear power is banned.
An illegal nuclear reactor would have to be able to run on natural uranium, as enrichment infrastructure would be impossible to conceal from the authorities. A graphite-moderated, water-cooled design would be ideal, as it would be smaller than a Magnox-style gas-cooled reactor.
@ Rod – Probably good that you didn’t mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both cases, the weapons were detonated at altitudes sufficient enough to prevent the fireball from intersecting with the ground. This limited the amount of bomb debris that mixed with material from the ground so there wasn’t’ any local fallout. Pretty much the only radioactivity left on the ground was from neutron activation of building materials near GZ. We also have to be careful not to directly compare the prompt high dose from a weapon to a chronic dose to tissue from a particle of plutonium or americium lodged in the lung.
Don’t know if you have ever read this, ‘THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION’
Professor Emeritus, Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh, Published by Plenum Press, 1990
It’s online. The chapters on the design of the Chernobyl plant and the details of the accident and aftermath are the most detailed I’ve read. In fact, the whole book is terrific.
The following main lessons can be deduced from this accident:
(1) Ionizing radiation killed only a few occupationally exposed people. Due to rapid decay of short-lived radionuclides, the Chernobyl fallout did not expose the general population to harmful radiation doses. This is a completely different situation than after a surface explosion of a nuclear bomb, where the lethal fallout can cover tens of thousands km2, and endanger the life of millions of people.
(2) The reported excess of thyroid cancers in children and in adults exposed to Chernobyl fallout is not consistent with the knowledge on effects of medical use of iodine-131. The report of an “excess” appears to be an effect of screening, and is only a small fraction of the normal occult thyroid cancers incidence occurring in populations unexposed to iodine-131. It disingenuous to continue to invoke latency every time actual results fail to meet the dire predictions made previously. We were told shortly after the event, when the immediate death toll was found to be minimal, that the full impact would not be felt for twenty years. Twenty-five years later, the Cassandras are now saying it could be as much as sixty years before the damage appears, or maybe several generations in the future. At what point do we accept the fact that the impact of this accident has not been anywhere as serious as it was assumed it would be?
(3) Radionuclides were injected high into the stratosphere, at least up to 15 km altitude, which made possible its long distance migration in the whole Northern Hemisphere, and a penetration over the Equator down to the South Pole. With the extremely sophisticated radiation monitoring systems, implemented in all developed countries, even the most tiny debris from the Chernobyl reactor was easily detected all over the world. No such system exists for any other potentially harmful environmental agent. Ironically, this excellence of radiological protection ignited the mass anxiety, with its disastrous consequences in the former Soviet Union, and strangulation of nuclear energy development elsewhere.
(4) Psychosomatic disorders and the screening effects were the only detectable health consequences among the general population.
(5) This was the worst possible catastrophe of a badly constructed nuclear reactor, with a complete meltdown of the reactor core, followed by the ten-days long completely free emission of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Nothing worse could happen. It resulted in a comparatively small occupational death toll, amounting to fraction of each weekend’s traffic toll in most developed nations and tens or hundreds of times lower than that of many other industrial catastrophes, and it is unlikely that any fatalities were caused by radiation among the public. The event was caused by an inherently poor design, shoddy construction coupled with a criminal lack of good judgment. There is simply no rational grounds for continuing to hold this event up as an example of the potential for an accident at any modern nuclear powerplant. In fact if anything it demonstrates just how small the overall impact of a worse-case power excursion and critical loss of containment is even under the poor emergency response conditions that were in place at the time.
‘Order of magnitude’ – just noting that in your comment in response to the Telegraph article you used the expression ‘orders of magnitude’. IMO the majority of the public doesn’t understand this expression the way the technical community does. To us, of course, an order of magnitude is a scaling by a factor of 10. To much of the public, this most likely means ‘a lot bigger (or smaller)’.
I suggest that in comments for the general public, and especially for environmentalists and deniers of all sorts, we be more specific. Say hundreds, thousands, and millions of times when we mean 2, 3, and 6 orders of magnitude. I suspect that most people didn’t really understand exponential notation when they encountered it in school.
@Andrew Jaremko
You may be right, but I am not trying to convince anyone whose education and curiosity about the world is at a level where they do not understand “orders of magnitude” and exponential notation. I reject the theory that the obstacle to developing nuclear energy comes from the uneducated. The real obstacle now is attracting sufficient financial backing to move forward. I hope that there are a few sophisticated decision makers and investors reading what I write and thinking about how nuclear energy offers the opportunity to get out of the deepening fossil fuel hole that our global economy is in.
If people do not understand the impact of “orders of magnitude” words like billions, trillions and quadrillions do not mean much.
Just in case you’ve not seen the new UNSCEAR report:
http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_D_Chernobyl_Report.pdf
Basically it confirms the previous report albeit with more evidence.
The vast majority of the population were exposed to low levels of radiation comparable, at most, to or a few times the annual natural background radiation levels and need not live in fear of serious health consequences. This is true for the populations of the three countries most affected by the Chernobyl accident, Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, and even more so for the populations of other European countries. Lives have been disrupted by the Chernobyl accident, but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the future health of most individuals should prevail.
For a comprehensive overview of Chernobyl, I recommend
Observations on Chernobyl after 25 Years of Radiophobia by
Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc.
Jaworowski,a former UNSCEAR chief, was head of radiation protection in Poland at
the time of the accident.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Summer_2010/Observations_Chernobyl.pdf