![]() What about Three Mile Island? After the accident in 1979, Time Magazine ran a cover story that superimposed a glowing headline, “Nuclear Nightmare,” over an image of the plant. The worker’s cancer was highly unlikely to have come from Fukushima because, once again, the level of radiation workers received was far lower than the ones received by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki cohort that saw (modestly) higher cancer rates. It did, but for reasons that were clearly political, and having to do with the Japanese government’s consensus-based, conflict-averse style, as well as lingering guilt felt by elite policymakers toward Fukushima workers and residents, who felt doubly aggrieved by the tsunami and meltdowns. Even those who received a dose 1,000 times higher than today’s safety limit saw their lives cut short by an average of 16 months.īut didn’t the Japanese government recently award a financial settlement to the family of a Fukushima worker who claimed his cancer was from the accident? Careful, large, and long-term studies of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offer compelling demonstration.Ĭancer rates were just 10 percent higher among atomic blast survivors, most of whom never got cancer. In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher because of high concentrations of uranium in the ground, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the U.S.Įven relatively high doses of radiation cause far less harm than most people think. Support for the idea that radiation is harmless at low levels comes from the fact that people who live in places with higher background radiation, like Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer. LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but that assumption has been discredited over recent decades by multiple sources of data. “That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the “linear no-threshold” method of extrapolating deaths from radiation. Geraldine Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, that number is based on a disproven methodology. The World Health Organization claims on its web site that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of 4,000 people, but according to Dr. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent - it is an easy cancer to treat - expected deaths may be 160. What about cancer? By 2065 there may be 16,000 thyroid cancers to date there have been 6,000. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.” Since the Chernobyl accident, 19 first responders have died, according to the United Nations, for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. in 2018, and 343 firefighters died during the Septemterrorist attacks. While the death of any firefighter is tragic, it’s worth putting that number in perspective. Twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire. There was no containment dome, and the fire spewed out radioactive particulate matter, which went all over the world, leading many to conclude that Chernobyl is not just the worst nuclear accident in history but is also the worst nuclear accident possible. Operators lost control of an unauthorized experiment that resulted in the reactor catching fire. The nuclear plant is in Ukraine which, in 1986, the year of the accident, was a Soviet Republic.
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