[ RadSafe ] [Fwd: [srp] Re: IAEA's Chernobyl death count]

[Marcel Schouwenburg]

Received through another list (SRP)

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IAEA's Chernobyl death count

Here's Greenpeace's critique of the IAEA digest of the UN technical 
studies.  The IAEA gives no defence on its website for misattributing 
its numbers to the UN report.
  Max Wallis

Greenpeace press release: on UN report on Chernobyl nuclear disaster  
 06/09/2005 
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/_*Whitewashing Chernobyl's impacts*_/

At a press conference today, the IAEA presented its conclusions of a 
set of scientific reports on the impacts of Chernobyl by several UN 
bodies. The report: "Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environmental and 
Socio-Economic Impacts" examines the effects of the disaster as its 
20th anniversary approaches. The report is itself a digest of 
another, 3-volume, 600-page report by hundreds of scientists, 
economists and health experts.

The report highlights that the casualties' toll was limited to 50 
workers and the eventual number can be expected to reach about 4,000.

Remarkably, these conclusions are not substantiated by these reports, 
or even contradicted by them. Often, research has been omitted and 
where scientific uncertainty exists, the conclusion is simply that 
there is no impact. A more careful reading of the 600-page report, as 
well as previous published research by UN-bodies leads to very 
different conclusions. A few examples:

* WHO refers to a study on 72,000 Russian workers of which 212 died 
as the result of radiation. The total number of 'liquidators' (in 
Belarus, Russia and Ukraine) is estimated at some 600,000;

 * The number of 4,000 deaths of the IAEA only relates to a studied 
population of 600,000, whereas radiation was spread over most of 
Europe. The IAEA is omitting the impacts of Chernobyl on millions of 
Europeans;

 * The IAEA tries to make strict distinction between health impacts 
attributable to radiation and other health impacts attributable to 
stress, social situation etc. However, the WHO is referring to 
numerous reports which indicate an impact of radiation on the immune 
system, causing a wide range of health effects;

The IAEA states today that previous researchers who have estimated 
the number of deaths in the range of tens to hundreds of thousands 
have exaggerated the impacts. This is not correct.

The WHO rightly refers to 2 different methodological approaches to 
assess the health impacts of radiation.
* The first one - and scientifically the most accepted approach - is 
based on the standards set by the International Commission on 
Radiation Protection (ICRP) and which assumes that there is a lineal 
relationship between radiation dose and effect, without a threshold. 
This means that if a very large population is subjected to a very low 
dose, the collective impact can still be very serious. In the case of 
the Chernobyl accident, this leads to estimates in the range of 10 to 
hundreds of thousands of casualties.

 * The other approach is based on epidemiology and tries to report 
the actual number of casualties and use statistical methods to 
estimate the total number of casualties for a population. This 
approach is valuable in well controlled situations, but can become 
very problematic in complex situations such as in Europe, where were 
it will be absolutely impossible to relate individual cases cancer 
e.g. in Belgium or France to the Chernobyl fallout.

The Chernobyl explosion occurred April 26, 1986, when an out-of-
control nuclear reaction blew off the roof of the steel building and 
spewed tons of radioactive material into the air. It was the worst 
nuclear accident in history.

"It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the 
most serious industrial accident in human history," said Jan Vande 
Putte, Greenpeace International nuclear campaigner. "Denying the real 
implications is not only insulting the thousands of victims - who are 
told to be sick because of stress and irrational fear - but is also 
leading to dangerous recommendations, to relocated people in 
contaminated areas."

For more information:
Jan Vande Putte, Greenpeace International 
jan.vande.putte at int.greenpeace.org

(1) WHO, Low doses of radiation linked to small increase in cancer 
risk.
http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr166a.html
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Max Wallis   				wallismk at cf.ac.uk 
Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology 	tel. 029 2087 6436       
2 North Road 				fax 029 2087 6424       
Cardiff University CF10 2DY               

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Marcel Schouwenburg - RadSafe moderator & List owner
Head Training Centre Delft
National Centre for Radiation Protection (Dutch abbr. NCSV)

Faculty of Applied Sciences / Reactor Institute Delft
Delft University of Technology
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NL - 2629 JB  DELFT
The Netherlands
Phone +31 (0)15 27 86575
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email   m.schouwenburg at tnw.tudelft.nl