It is hard to describe a major disaster that is less damaging then Chernobyl. There are train wrecks that are comparable to Chernobyl by deaths [0]. On that note; wow, what a horrific rain wreck that must have been.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported. And deaths don't cover the full "cost" of Chernobyl. Displacing thousands of people lead to poverty, depression and suicide. The economic and social damage was huge. The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.
I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union. This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.
If you look at it from that perspective: No, I don't think that a hurricane hitting Houston would be as damaging as Chernobyl and cause the United States to collapse.
You're not helping your argument when you make it sound like a bold new theory and use (good) TV fiction to bolster it up. I propose a quote from a certain Mikhail Gorbachev instead:
> He states flatly that the Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Gorbachev, the Chernobyl explosion was a “turning point” that “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.”
https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/chernobyl-and-the-fall-...
But note that here it's more about how Chernobyl exposed deep dysfunctions within the Soviet system and how it might have contributed to precipitate its collapse. I don't really know if that counts as "damage".
And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.
I just thought it was amusing to present that theory in that way, when it's been brought up by Mr СССР himself.
Also, your accusation of his comment being petty is pretty ironic.
Without Chernobyl, but with Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.
Without Gorbachev's reforms, but with Chernobyl, the Soviet Union would still exist, just as PRC did not collapse from Tiananmen Square and DPRK did not collapse from 1990s famine.
Maybe, if you only take the 31 number, that one is indeed grossly underreported. But any other estimate (like the common 4000 number) is really a wild guess. The reason is not Soviet Union keeping secrets, but more fundamental, it's really really hard to give any meaningful estimate in a situation like this even with 100% transparency.
> I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union.
In that case, it was a net win.
long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
What’s more concerning is limiting things to deaths as if that was the only form of harm. People can survive cancer, but not without economic, emotional, etc harm. Further, giant exclusion zones and ongoing mitigation efforts are extremely expensive.
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
The UNSCEAR is a UN group of scientists who study radiation, similar to the IPCC group studying climate. The fringe studies from Greenpeace and friends claiming more than 4000 deaths do not carry more weight than the UNSCEAR numbers.
Oversimplifying, if you distribute the radiation that was released evenly in a group of 8000 persons, each one has a 50% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.
If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 80000 persons, each one has a 5% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.
If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 8000000 persons, each one has a 0.05% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 death.
But in the 8000000 group the radiation level is too low and there is also normal background radiation, and other normal risk, so the real number is probably less than 4000 deaths.
In a realistic scenario, some people get more radiation and some less radiation, but the nice part of the simplified model is that it always predict 4000 deaths. But this number is like an upper bound, the real number of deaths is probably less.
The disagreement stems in part from the extremely high rate of cancers and thus precancerous tissue among people which means than some tissue is unusually vulnerable. This is supported by skin cancer rates. The opposite conclusion is based on cellular responses to low level radiation exposure, which may provide protection from future exposure.
If it was actually clear LNT was a bad model we would be using something else, but it’s not obvious which direction it should be updated. Presumably, the reality is some non linear effect relating to lifetime exposure for radiation and other cancer risks, but collecting accurate data is difficult.
Detecting an increase in cancer deaths from a specific source when cancers represent 1 in 6 deaths worldwide is extremely difficult. If cancer killed 100 people per year then detecting an increase of ~X00 extra deaths per year would be much simpler. On the other hand try to isolate ~1 extra cancer death per 10,000 deaths is a pipe dream.
You're talking about a TV show meant to entertain and generate buzz and word of mouth. It's not meant to be taken as an actual explanation. The theories of a TV show, no matter how grounded in reality, shouldn't be trotted out as examples when we have the actual reality and facts the TV show is based on.
In a time when facts are freely available to everyone, people are pointing to entertainment as data points into how we should make policy. It's embarrassing to see.
The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because Soviet Union doesn't exist.
The soviet union didn't have stats on this because they knew those stats would make them look bad long before (and regardless of whether or not) the reactor went pop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
The Soviets were also even less careful than the US about tests of high nuclear yield weapons.
I’m acquainted with one of Russia’s chief oncologists, who was one of the primary physicians that dealt with the consequences of Chernobyl. She’s been quite clear that the number of people affected is both large and well-suppressed.
Of course, the very nature of “the state makes sure not to collect damaging statistics” means I can’t actually quantify the real harm done. For all I know, maybe it’s just equal to ‘two’ bad train wrecks.
Edit: Of course I knew there was a tiny tiny risk - but still something I remember thinking about.
What did they find? How bad was the impact?
> The caesium levels of 8 wild boar and 11 roe deer samples exceeded the limit out of the 490 specimens
Now, 19 out of 490 specimens exceeding the Cs-137 concentration level limits is too high a percentage for me, but maybe other people are willing to take more risks in this area compared to me.
[1] https://www.medindia.net/news/wild-boar-meat-in-austrian-sup...
[2] https://www.ages.at/en/topics/radiation-protection/caesium-1...
They found that keeping testing going this century serves the valuable function of keeping the public at ease and the cost isn't that high (testing is pretty small scale now) so why not keep it.
The primary source of radiation was airborne dust (and therefore precipitation as well). Crops and farm raised animals have been clean for a long time. The primary risk is shooting a buck that ate a berry that had something nasty on it back in 1995 but between the half lives of the radioactive compounds in question and the pattern of events required to get those components to one's dinner plate the risk is beyond minimal at this point.
And you could argue that its "low", but its in the very sense "Russian roulette", you never know if it is you, maybe you where unlucky and ate a side of that wild boar that contained 39706 becquerel per kilo...
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
The "Russian roulette" hypothesis is unsupported at dose rates near natural background radiation. For example, the natural background dose varies widely around the world, and we have not found a statistically link between high background areas (like Denver) and low background areas.
Radiation at low levels has been around for billions of years. Life evolved with it and can handle it to a degree. So the idea that a tiny bit more radiation is dangerous is wrong because of our repair mechanisms.
In direct deaths, Chernobyl didn't cause that many but I have seen estimates of the cancer toll that are a lot higher than most accidents
I really don't understand the exclusive focus on deaths here. Cancer and genetic deformations can make your life hell even if they don't cause death.
If you live in the fallout region then you are going to be placed in a high-risk category and are going to be watched more closely for cancer than the general population. By observing something we change it.
In the US we even have warnings on all alcoholic beverages that say pregnant women should not drink alcohol.
Perhaps I was being too limited in my concept of "birth defects" - including for radiation. If the radiation while pregnant (or before) gives the child cancer at five, is that a "birth defect"? Maybe not, in the way I was thinking, but I can see how it might be thought of that way.
If Oroville Dam had given way back in 2017 that could easily have been America's Chernobyl. It made for exciting news.
Others don't.
Also, did you into account all the indirect effects of radiation?
Having cancer death after ten years, because radiation was released, is a direct death. Direct origin, direct cause, Wouldn't be happening without the event. This child would had born normal. This woman would not die in an hospital at 52 years old.
We have registered increases in thyroid cankers, we have plenty of healthcare centers data showing that something abnormal is still happening with this population. Is embarrassing to see nuclear related people claiming after all this years that, if you can't trace it, is not their problem, specially when half of Europe was about to be seriously poisoned forever.
The Houston Ship Channel has the potential to become an environmental disaster similar to Chernobyl, but affecting the fourth-largest population and economic center in the US.
It's not hyperbole -- if you drive down 225 and 146 from Houston to Galveston, it feels like you're in the Sonic the Hedgehog Chemical Plant Zone... it just goes on and on at an unbelievable scale. It self-perpetuates partially because expanding existing petrochemical complexes seems to meet less opposition than building new ones.
https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+ship+channel+plants&...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7348066,-95.1345542,13223m/d...
Fact is, we use epidemiology to understand these things, and the jury is in [1].
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
Anecdotally, my college girlfriend was a child in Gomel Belarus during Chernobyl. Her father had a Geiger counter and took readings around here. There was lots of elevated dose rates. She is perfectly healthy to this day though!