Comment by callmevlad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by callmevlad | Hacker News Reader

Having grown up in Russia and personally being in contact with a few people affected by the Chernobyl fallout, it's a bit hard to take someone who tries to diminish the impact of that accident to this degree.

Yes, maybe the UN report showed such a small number of confirmed fatalities, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they based it mostly on data collected by the Soviet Union. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust any data that came from an authoritarian government, especially one run by a bunch of Russians, especially one that collapsed 20 years ago (likely destroying countless incriminating documents in the process), especially concerning a deeply embarrassing incident such as Chernobyl.

The public may be overreacting to the nuclear threat posed by the Fukushima reactors, but this seems like a subtle attempt at rewriting history.

(I wouldn't be surprised if there is a UN report 20 years from now proving that Saddam Hussein did indeed win re-election with 99% of the vote.)

Not to mention that they covered up the Chernobyl accident for I can't remember how many days before even bothering to tell the locals that they're in danger.

In the nineties, families in the country around where I grew up, here in Ireland, hosted children from Chernobyl every summer, so that they could breath clean air and eat clean food. I've also seen documentaries about birth defects in the years after the accident. Perhaps there weren't too many fatalities, but a lot of lives were very badly affected by the radiation and a lot more people died due to slow, radiation induced diseases. For example, in the reports, how many people who died of cancer or other diseases since were counted?

So, I agree with you - downplaying the dangers of radiation is careless and playing with peoples lives.

IIRC Pripyat was evacuated 36 hours later.

Ah, I think you're right.

Still, 36 hours in a very high radiation environment is a very long time. also, I'm not sure how long the people in Chernobyl itself were there before being told something was wrong.

Hell, the soviet union didn't admit anything was wrong until a couple of days after, when the radiation was noticed by engineers in Sweden[1].

[1] http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9604/26/chernobyl/230pm/index2.html

A good friend's wife spent a good bit of time in Belarus recently (well, 2006-2007), primarily assisting children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears. Really amazing what's still going on over there, to this day. The incident at Chernobyl might have occurred in the Ukraine, but it was not the most affected. Sad, even if I am a highly pro-nuclear guy.

I believe most of the radiation was literally rained down on Belarus, so they got a much much worse dose of it than the Ukraine did.

From what I've read, the Soviet government used cloud seeding to force the radiation to be rained down on Belarus because they wanted to prevent it from reaching higher populated areas like Moscow. Unfortunately, afaik, they never told the Belarusian people about it so they never had a chance of evacuating beforehand. Its pretty sad.

... children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears.

You can go to hospitals anywhere in the world and hear exactly the same stories. Kids get cancer. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. Is there any evidence that these cancers were caused by Chernobyl?

Sadly, very much so. A massive portion of the radiation went into Belarus, and they're still dealing with the results to this day, although things are finally dropping. I asked the same question, and she showed me a bunch of good evidence, although I have none on hand. Wish I did, rather than just telling a story.

Yes.

- Between 1970 and 2001 thyroid cancer incidence rates in Belarus increased from 0.4 per 100 000 to 3.5 per 100 000 among males (+775%) and from 0.8 per 100 000 to 16.2 per 100 000 among females (+1925%).

- The relative increases in areas with ‘higher exposure’ from the Chernobyl disaster exceeded those in ‘lower exposure’ areas with marked increases in thyroid cancer incidence rate ratios among both genders and in all age groups.

- The largest increases were observed among people from ‘higher exposure’ areas ages 0-14 yr at time of diagnosis, suggesting that a high prevalence of pre-existing iodine deficiency, in combination with unique susceptibility among younger people, might have contributed to potential carcinogenic exposures to the thyroid.

- The magnitude of increases observed is remarkable given the relatively limited time interval since Chernobyl ...

From: http://www.ceecis.org/iodine/04a_consequences/05_nuclear/Che...

[Edit: formatting]

Relative increases seem insane... But overall - that is still a low number. More are killed by their own parents for various reasons.

I'd really like that we put things into perspective a bit.

By comparison, the total incidence of cancers among males aged 0-14 in SEER areas in the USA (representing 28% of the population, per their website) is 149.5 per million, and for females aged 0-14 is 128.7 per million. Thyroid carcinoma is at 0.9 per million in males, and 2.9 per million in females[1]. So, while they had a higher rate than in the USA even before 1970 (4 per million for males and 8 per million for females), I would be extremely doubtful that the increase in numbers is just due to an increase in diagnosis because doctors are expecting to see cancers.

[1] http://seer.cancer.gov/publications/childhood/adolescents.pd...

Its not just cancer. A lot of children there have been born with severe[1] birth defects since.

[1] For example, heres a documentary on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fCCVU4y7oE Note that I don't know how accurate this particular documentary is and I haven't watched it all, but I have seen others with similar content. WARNING: don't watch if you're not prepared to see severely deformed children. Its not very nice at all, really :(

>> The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears.

I've heard a few such stories myself recently. About children in Serbia and west Bulgaria, born around the depleted plutonium bombing.

I've heard of depleted uranium, but depleted plutonium is new to me.

Googling a bit, I think you mean depleted uranium, but perhaps wrote 'plutonium' because one of the problems with depleted uranium is that it is (often?) contaminated with plutonium. Just guessing.

Have you seen the actual numbers of this, and seen them put into perspective? I'd strongly recommend looking at http://xkcd.org/radiation/ -- he puts the data into an easy to relate to format.

The biggest problem with that chart is that it mixes different time scales, which it only indicates in the text, not in the visual comparisons.

Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different.

Yeah, this was one of my big complaints with that. However, it's not prevalent enough to disregard it. It's by no means scientific, but I think it gives a good high level orders-of-magnitude view, largely.

As mentioned in the BBC article though, doing that kind of math does not lead to an accurate result, due to the fact that your body is constantly healing. It's the bursts of radiation that are most damaging.

I would hardly count xkcd as a scientifically factual comic. Besides, as waterlesscloud said, he mixes up timescales (or in some cases uses simply uSv's, which, I hear, makes no sense without a timescale. Ie 5 uSv = wrong, 5 uSv/hour = ok).

In this case, he gives sources for all his data. And while he does mix up timescales, he's really not far off. It can be better, but it's not bad.

In that case, what were you referring to when posting the chart: Fukushima or Chernobyl?

If Chernobyl, the article mentions only a small number of fatalities, but I've read in many places over the years that thousands of people (especially in Belarus, who got the worst of it) have since died from cancer and other radiation induced diseases. I've also seen documentaries about the many sick and deformed children that were born since, because of their parents high exposure to radiation.

Finally, when I was growing up, I saw many affected children first hand, as a lot of families in my school at the time would host children affected by the accident during the summer.

If you were referring to Fukushima, I agree that it doesn't come close to Chernobyl (that we know of, at least), but the linked article makes Chernobyl sound "not that bad" too, which I cannot agree with.

Fukushima -- Chernobyl, I believe, was misrepresented there. However, it's misrepresented everywhere.

Ah, we are in agreement then.

Yes, I mostly understand the scale of radiation we're currently dealing with in Japan, and it's mostly on the "safer" side. However, my issue is with taking an accident that deformed countless children, caused countless cases of cancer, and in general completely devastated the lives of (hundreds of) thousands of people - and essentially using it in a "How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb" argument to get people to calm down. Yes, there is a level of overreaction any time a nuclear accident takes place (Japan, TMI come to mind), but I wish people wouldn't gloss over the suffering of so many people in order to make their point.

It was a great tragedy. But neither was the the number of deformed children nor the number of cases of cancer "countless". There have been put numbers on it [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_th...

And which number is the right one?

According to your link:

  - UNSCEAR claims 6000 cases of cancer.
  - IAEA claims 4000 deaths
  - Greenpeace claims 200,000 deaths
  - IPPNW claims 10,000 - 50,000 cases of cancer
  - New York Academy of Sciences claims 985,000 deaths

Hang on, chernobyl deformed countless children? Countless as in "too many to count", or faultless as in "i can't help indulging in hyperbole".

Countless as in "we don't have the ability to accurately count" ... "immeasurable" would have been more accurate.

Sorry, that's a misuse of countless, which means immeasurable in the sense of being too many to count.

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