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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

You should watch this documentary on Chernobyl:

>According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators

They had guys running in and throwing lead bricks - and some of the scientists died by giving their life to get in and take video of the meltdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti-WdTF2Qr8

These guys knew they were doomed.

But they had freaking reportedly 700,000 men attack that problem.

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I've met a dying Chernobyl first responder on a commuter train in Belarus, back in early 1990s.

These people never made it to WHO statistic as their deaths protracted over many years can not be directly attributed to the accident. As pro nuclear crowd would be happy to tell you, only couple dozen firemen died on the first day and that was it, making nuclear meltdowns almost benign incidents.

It is a pretty hard-hearted thing to say, but if the WHO doesn't think there is enough evidence to count his death in the Chernobyl statistics, what evidence does he have they are wrong? I mean, it isn't unprecedented for crippling damage to not surface for a long time (eg, asbestos/mesothelioma), but on the other hand cancer can strike at any age [0] and people struggle to attribute things to chance if they have a potential reason for it.

The WHO is using a statistical model to account for the fact that individual deaths might be cancer or might be something else. There is pretty concrete evidence that in terms of deaths nuclear meltdowns are benign, and the major concerns are land contamination and how big the exclusion zones need to be when things go wrong. Some of the better science-based counterarguments to nuclear I've heard go to contamination in the food chain.

[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

Most of the studies among Chernobyl liquidators were based on monitoring the cohorts between 1994 to 2004. Very little was done form 1986 to 1991 at all.

The "never made it to WHO statistics" as the difference in cancer incidence rates and other problems after Chernobyl are so small that they are hard to distinguish from the background noise. A lot of work has gone into trying to document the actual effects, but the reality is that while there were initial large spikes in e.g. thyroid cancer among children, the cancers that spiked are ones with very high survival rates. The WHO estimates were initially very high, but keep being adjusted down because every year that goes is another year without a spike in deaths above expected levels.

The breakup of the Soviet Union caused much larger scale effects on life expectancy.

The effects of the Chernobyl radiation are apparently common, that when I left my luggage in the Belorusskaya train station in Moscow I encountered a very large plaque describing exactly what categories of people were allowed to get in front of the queue when retrieving your stored luggage -- with "People suffering from radiation as consequence of Chernobyl" on the list.

If you served in the military for at least 6 months 1941-1945, you were higher on the priority list, which included around 17 different very detailed categories, all translated to English too.

The accurate number of deaths appears to be very controversial.

Most certainly - I'd expect its way higher.

They were referred to bio-robots.

There are a few documentaries about them. A lot of elderly volunteered to be a bio-robot.

There was one doc that showed them throwing lead bricks into the pit - and they were only capable of being exposed up to like ~2 minutes maximum of something.

10% of an adult population dying over the course of 20 years doesn't seem inherently crazy? The WHO says no more than 4k died due to the accident.

It sounds far too good to be true. According to the actuarial tables at [0], 10% is the expected 20-year death rate for 40-year old men. This is for Americans in 2014, I'd expect the outcomes to be worse for Soviet citizens in 1986.

[0]https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying

In 1986, the life expectancy for Soviet men (at birth) was 65 years:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2546027/?page=1

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