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By Root 709 0

death toll counted in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands, as antinuclear campaigners and the media have often asserted.45 Exhaustive studies of affected populations, firemen who attended the blaze (many of whom received colossal radiation doses), and the thousands of “liquidators” who later cleaned up the site, yield an estimated death toll that currently stands at less than 50. Several thousand children did suffer from thyroid cancer as a result of radioactive iodine doses received from Chernobyl—but as thyroid cancer is relatively treatable, by 2002 thankfully only 15 of the estimated 4,000 cases of childhood thyroid cancer had proved fatal.46 All this could have been avoided had the Soviet authorities distributed iodine pills to the affected populations.

In 2000 the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) concluded that “there is no evidence of a major public health impact related to ionising radiation 14 years after the Chernobyl accident. No increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality that could be associated with radiation exposure have been observed.” Moreover: “The risk of leukaemia, one of the most sensitive indicators of radiation exposure, has not been found to be elevated even in the accident recovery operation workers or in children. There is no scientific proof of an increase in other non-malignant disorders related to ionizing radiation.” Nor is there any scientific medical basis to reports of increased abnormalities among children.47 The well-intentioned activities of the various “Children of Chernobyl” cancer charities notwithstanding, there is no evidence for claimed increases in deformities or illnesses in children exposed as compared with unexposed populations in eastern Europe.

None of this is to downplay the terrible impacts of the Chernobyl disaster on the people who were affected by it. But the most serious impacts of Chernobyl may actually be social and psychological: Higher levels of depression and anxiety have been reported in people who were exposed to radiation or evacuated—and this stress seems to have been passed from parents to children. People’s self-identified status as “Chernobyl victims” has led to dependency, poor health, alcohol abuse, and even suicide, according to UNSCEAR.48 The unfortunate truth is that the general post-Chernobyl antinuclear hysteria, reinforced by exaggerated death tolls and impacts published over subsequent years by environmental groups, has probably worsened the victim status trauma suffered by the people who lived in the area. Indeed there is strong evidence that fear of radiation has been much more damaging than radiation itself: Consider, for example, the large number of additional abortions undertaken by women in Eastern Europe who considered themselves to have been exposed and therefore likely to bear deformed or diseased children.

Yet the emotive impact of anecdotal evidence from Chernobyl has been used relentlessly by environmental groups in support of their battle against nuclear power. Greenpeace maintains a website of heartrending black-and-white photos of mentally retarded, cancer-stricken, and deformed children, taken in the Ukraine and nearby countries, with the title “The real face of the nuclear industry.”49 Given the lack of these claimed horrors found by scientifically authoritative studies of Chernobyl, this kind of propaganda seems to me to be an abuse of real people’s suffering. For example, I find the statement of Greenpeace International’s director Gerd Leipold, made on the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in 2006, quite distasteful. Leipold laments “the bedridden children with cancers and degenerative diseases who must be turned every fifteen minutes in excruciating pain,” and “the parents who themselves suffer from chronic radiation-related diseases,” and concludes on this basis that “nuclear power is inherently highly dangerous” and that “another catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl could still happen anytime, anywhere.”

This assertion ignores the fact that the Chernobyl-type