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I don't think that's how the author arrived at his conclusions. I think he directly analyzed mortality vs fallout

Cancers occur naturally so you need an exposure model to give you an idea of what to expect, and then compare that to the background of normal cancer. Even assuming that he checked mortality records which I assume he must have, he still had to apply statistical filter to make it meaningful.

Actually no you don’t need any such model. Given the map of exposure areas, one can simply compare with other non exposure areas with similar variables for all other major risks

Reading the paper, he specifically doesn't care about cause of death, just excess.

Interesting tidbits. Most discussion about dangers of radiation is about cancer. But some stuff I've heard centered around Chernobyl is other types of mortality increase.

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