Chernobyl Radiation Equal to Everyday Risks
I think that must be a late April fools joke.
NERC = Government QUANGO.
The government sponsored nuclear studies are done by similar motivated people who said that nuclear power would be so cheap that it would be too expensive to meter it in the 1950's. They are the same people who said the nuclear reactor designs were so safe no accident would ever happen.
Utterly discredited data, and disgraceful behaviour by supposed scientists in government employment. They see nothing in front of their noses unless it has their paycheck attached to it.
The actual number of deaths from Chernobyl will be nearer 500,000 according to this article, and all the personal evidence I have says it probably the more accurate figure.
guardian.co.uk
ratical.com
Here is an excerpt you can read alongside that late April fools joke from NERC...
A heartbreaking report on the hidden dimensions of the
Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was published in Germany in 1991,
written by the Ukrainian nuclear physicist chosen to "liquidate
the consequences" of the accident. The book may never be published
in the Ukraine or Russia and the author, Vladimir Chernousenko,
now dying of radiation poisoning along with thousands of others
involved in the emergency cleanup, has been dismissed from his
post in the Ukrainian Academy of Science for telling the truth.
Along with comparable revelations in Sakharov's recently
published Memoirs, the treatment of Chernousenko suggests that the
former Soviet Union, by casting out its greatest scientists,
suffered from the same terminal disease that ultimately destroyed
the Hitler regime.
Both Sakharov and Chernousenko were punished for revealing a
secret kept from the public from the earliest years of the Nuclear
Age, having to do with the lethal effects on the immune system of
ingesting manmade nuclear fission products.Richard Rhodes, in his
classic history of the making of the atom bomb [1], relates that
as far back as 1943 Enrico Fermi approached Robert Oppenheimer
with the suggestion that if they could not develop the bomb in
time, the same purpose would be served by dumping strontium-90
which he was generating at his pilot reactor at the University of
Chicago over the German land-mass. Oppenheimer then discussed the
proposal with Edward Teller who agreed that their animal studies
would indicate that radioactive strontium would enter into the
food chain and be deposited "dangerously and irretrievably in
bone" and kill perhaps 500,000 persons. The plan was discarded
because they could not be sure the desired deaths would occur
quickly enough. After the bomb was developed, the military did not
want an atomic explosion associated with the possibility of
biological damage so the animal studies remained classified until
1969.
The publication in English of Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs
informs us that he too came to the conclusion that the nuclear
bomb was primarily a biological weapon, although this fact has
been studiously passed over by all the highly laudatory reviews it
has received. As the developer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,
Sakharov was the most eminent and authoritative nuclear scientist
to reveal these secrets, which lie at the very heart of the
origins of the Cold War.
In Chapter 14 Sakharov writes that after the success of his
1955 Soviet H-Bomb test, he "worried more and more about the
biological effects of nuclear tests... The long-term biological
consequences (particularly atmospheric testing, in which
radioactive fallout is dispersed throughout the hemisphere) can be
predicted and the total number of casualties calculated with some
accuracy."
Considering only such fission products as radioactive carbon,
strontium and cesium, he calculated that genetic damage, plus the
immediate and delayed damage to immune systems would accelerate
the deaths of between 500,000 to one million persons for every 50
megatons of nuclear explosive power. An important consideration
was what he termed "nonthreshold effects", by which every
radioactive particle released had a statistical probability of
doing damage to either the DNA of a cell or to the immune system,
by low-level internal radiation from ingesting such particles. He
also predicted that radiation would accelerate the mutation of
microorganisms, leading to the inference that persons with damaged
immune systems would in time succumb more easily to these new
strains.
He states (page 201):
" I posited that cancer and damage to the body's immune
system (resulting in premature death) may also be due to
nonthreshold effects... I also suggested that a global
increase in mutations of bacteria and viruses
(irrespective of the cause of the mutations) might have
been an important factor in the spread of such diseases
as diphtheria in the 19th century, or the influenza
epidemic, and that low-level radiation might further
increase the rate of mutations."
Sakharov was permitted to publish this article in 1958 [2]
because of Khruschev's interest in a bomb test moratorium. He
tells of his consternation and outrage when in 1961, without
warning, he was told that Khruschev, after a fruitless meeting
with President Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, had decided to detonate
several H-Bombs, which were later rated by the National Resources
Defense Council as equivalent to 402 megatons of explosive power,
equal to 25,000 Hiroshima bombs [3]. When he finally had a chance
to express his opposition to these tests that he estimated would
cause perhaps 8 million premature deaths, he relates in Chapter 15
how he was publicly humiliated by Khruschev as politically
"naive". He thereafter lost all authority as a member of the
Soviet nuclear establishment.
Chernousenko's revelations on the enormous health effects of
the Chernobyl accident offer the greatest possible validation of
Sakharov's ominous predictions. He begins by demolishing many
Chernobyl myths offered by the Soviet authorities and eagerly
accepted by the international nuclear establishment. The accident
was not the result of operator error, but resulted from major
errors of design affecting 15 other Soviet reactors. In contrast
to the widely accepted belief that only 31 persons died from
exposure to high radiation levels in the effort to contain the
emissions, Chernousenko asserts that between 7,000 and 10,000
volunteers have already died from such high intensity exposure.
But his most serious charge is that the accident released the
lethal contents of 80 percent of the reactor core rather than the
3 percent figure announced to the world. This means that the true
extent of the potential damage had been understated by orders of
magnitude!
Chernousenko estimates that the radioactivity released was
equivalent to more than one curie for every person on earth, i.e.
more than one trillion picocuries per capita, to use the unit in
which radioactivity concentrations in milk and water are
customarily measured. |
