RE: Ukraine Orders Chernobyl Closed

["Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@aecl.ca>]

On Wednesday March 29, 2000 10:52 AM you wrote,

<snip>
> The Ukrainian government has blamed at least 8,000 deaths on the 
> disaster, including those killed immediately, workers who died in the 
> massive cleanup operation, and people who subsequently died of cancer 
> and other radiation-related illnesses. 
<snip>
<><><><><><><><><>

Sandy, Peter & other Radsafers,

Regarding the number of Chernobyl accident deaths, I recently came accross
this interesting (albeit somewhat dated) comment by a well-known US nuclear
commentator....


http://www.fas.org/rlg/ljan99.html
APS Forum on Physics and Society Volume 28, Number 1 January 1999 
LETTERS 
More on Deaths due to Chernobyl
by Richard Garwin
Senior Fellow for Science and Technology, Council on Foreign Relations;
IBM Emeritus Fellow; Adjunct Prof. of Physics, Columbia University 
e-mail: RLG2@watson.ibm.com

Retired VP and General Manager of GE Nuclear Energy, Bertram Wolf, reports
that there were "some 40 deaths in the due to nuclear radiation from the
(Chernobyl) accident. But there were some 50,000 baby deaths in Europe due
to abortions where mothers who feared the effects of the radiation, from
Chernobyl." And "Clearly, the people in Europe were not informed of the
negligible (maybe healthy) effects of low radiation levels." 
Involved with nuclear weapons and nuclear power since 1950, a member of the
APS study group on the safety of lightwater reactors (1975), and various
government-sponsored studies on reactor safety and allied topics, I judge
nuclear power to be a valuable option now and for the future. I have studied
the Chernobyl and Three-Mile-Island accidents, and the French, Japanese,
Chinese, and Russia nuclear power programs. But Wolf tells only part of the
story, reminding me of the "not proven" arguments of the tobacco executives.
The merits of nuclear power should carry the day, without propaganda--
either for or against. The best judgment of the International Commission on
Radiation Protection (ICRP) is that even for low-level radiation, deaths due
to cancer occur at a rate of 0.04 per person-sievert (400 per million
person-rem). There is little dispute over the collective exposure to the
population of the European community and the (former) USSR as 600,000
person-Sv. The cancer deaths are thus likely to be 24,000 (and not the 40
cited by Wolf). 
No critic of nuclear energy, Morris Rosen of the IAEA at a session in Nagoya
in April 1996 stated, "For the 3.7 million residents of other contaminated
areas the predicted lifetime excess is 2500 over the normal 430,000." He
stated that the average dose to each of those individuals was 7 mSv, for a
collective dose of 26,000 person-Sv. (The background exposure averages some
3 mSv per year.) But at that session (see http://www.fas.org/rlg and look
for "Nagoya") and in further correspondence, IAEA has never been willing to
concede that a collective dose of 600,000 person-Sv to the population of the
USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths, despite the judgment of
the ICRP and the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation--BEIR--of the
National Academy of Sciences, and despite the IAEA spokesman himself
indicating that 26,000 person-Sv at nearly the same dose and dose rate would
eventually lead to 2500 excess cancer deaths. These additional hazards due
to Chernobyl are less than 0.5% of natural cancer deaths among the exposed
population. Radiation hazards due to nuclear power, including accidents, are
low enough to be taken into account in normal cost-benefit analyses; but
they are not zero. 
As for the "maybe healthy effects of low radiation levels", Wolf may be
referring to a speech of John Graham of 1996, that cited a comparison of two
areas in China, one with high background radiation and one with more normal.
I have analyzed these data in conjunction with a book that Georges Charpak
and I will publish in English in 1999 (derived from a book we published in
France in 1997), and find that the ICRP estimates of radiation-induced
cancer would lead to the observation of 4 excess deaths in the
high-radiation area. Compared with the 25 expected fluctuation (standard
deviation of the difference), radiation induced deaths could simply not be
observed. 
I oppose the use of legal intervention for delaying (as contrasted with
settling) siting decisions. I think that commercial and competitive mined
geologic repositories in various countries and areas would be highly
beneficial to public health and to the nuclear industry, but this is true
even with the predicted radiation exposures from the nuclear fuel cycle and
the ICRP estimates of deaths due to cancer. It is not helpful to hinge the
future of the nuclear industry and an important element of the energy supply
to a claim that low levels of radiation cause "negligible" damage or are
even helpful. 



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