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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

Hold on.

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.

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>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.

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".

"Here's more evidence to support your idea" is perhaps the pettiest possible retort. Is agreeing with someone so hard?

His comment is actually a very good reply to the grandparent, which was making a poor job of supporting the argument.

Also, your accusation of his comment being petty is pretty ironic.

Re-reading my comment I can see how it could be interpreted that way, I meant it more as playful jab but such are the woes of a textual medium...

I just thought it was amusing to present that theory in that way, when it's been brought up by Mr СССР himself.

I didn't want to make it sound like it's a new theory at all. I applaud your addition with the quote and I didn't read it as negatory at all.

The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just happen to have finished reading it) is that the public damage and cost from Chernobyl was so unprecedented and spectacular in scope that it was impossible for the Soviet government to cover it up. And that what makes this remarkable is how this incident compared to other past incidents (not to mention purposeful engineering efforts) that the Soviet government had successfully managed to cover up and keep from the population. In other words, “exposed the dysfunction of the system” is accurate, but also incomplete. It omits the reason why this particular disaster, and not other disasters, was the trigger that caused this reckoning.

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.

It's not that surprising that the cause of the Soviet Union's collapse tries to pass the blame elsewhere.

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.

> The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported.

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.

That 4,000 is estimated based on just radiation to a small area and was never intended as any kind of a total.

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.

4,000 is based on a conservative linear-no threshold model across all irradiated populations [1].

[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.

Just to clarify what "conservative" means here.

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.

There is evidence that the linear no threshold model both over estimates and under estimates the increase in cancer deaths among humans.

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.

It’s important to understand the context for what’s being said. “given the low doses received by the majority of exposed individuals, any increase in cancer incidence or mortality will be difficult to detect in epidemiological studies.”

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.

>This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.

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 they didn't want those numbers to exist.

The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because Soviet Union doesn't exist.

>The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to 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.

Chernobyl was not their first round with that sort of disaster. It was however the first 'public' one.

What's the evidence of this? Is the theory that there was a meltdown in Siberia or something where there aren't many neighbors to notice?

There's the Kyshtym disaster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

The Soviets were also even less careful than the US about tests of high nuclear yield weapons.

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

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