RE: Request for suggestion [ "factor of 1000" ]

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

You wrote :

	--We are not talking about a slight difference. The difference is
a factor of 1000 or more, >10,000 vs <10 deaths per year on average. This
difference is not subsantially changed by different opinions about trust,
unless they claim that there will be several meltdowns per year.

<><><><><><><><><><>

COMMENT (again):

Please see Chernobyl article below.

As I said previously, public trust is required to some extent to believe
this "factor of 1000" in the face of constant media reports of thousands of
victims of the Chernobyl disaster. 
Most of the electronic media reports last week used the figure of ~4000
deaths due to Chernobyl. The Discovery Channel reported 200 deaths. The
National Post / AP article below reports 30,000 deaths.
People look at me with disbelieve when I cite the UNSCEAR data. 
Most would probably think this "factor of 1000" applies the other way. 
Nothing is being done to discipline the profession of journalism.
There is a code of ethics for journalism (see for example
http://spj.org/ethics/code.htm ), but this is generally ignored.

Jaro
frantaj@aecl

http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20001216/409166.htm
l
Chernobyl nuclear power plant closes Site of 1986 disaster
National Post, with files from news services
 Mikhail Metzel, The Associated Press

Leonid Kuchma, the President of Ukraine, presides over a celebrity-studded
crowd at a Kyiv concert hall yesterday as guests watch a live broadcast of
the last switch being turned off at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
 
The decrepit plant, a chilling symbol of the hidden dangers of the atomic
age, spewed nearly nine tonnes of radioactive dust across three quarters of
Europe in a calamitous accident on April 26, 1986, which has since claimed
about 30,000 lives.

Designed by the Soviet Union to become the largest nuclear generating
station in the world, Chernobyl, tucked away in a pine forest 125 kilometres
north of Kyiv, instead has become synonymous with disaster and helped hasten
the collapse of communism.

When Chernobyl's explosion ripped the roof off the plant's fourth nuclear
reactor block, it sent 100,000 nearby residents fleeing for their lives and
released more than 500 times the radioactive fallout of the two atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

The explosion rattled the Soviet Union to its core, stripping the lustre
from Mikhail Gorbachev's talk of glasnost, or openness, and exposing the raw
flaws of a brutally blundering government.

Nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chernobyl's last
functioning reactor was extinguished yesterday in a celebrity-studded
ceremony that saw 2,000 specially invited guests crowd into Kyiv's glitzy
concert hall, the Palace of Ukraine, to watch Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's
President, preside via television over the plant's final shutdown.

Pierre Cardin, the French couturier, rubbed shoulders with Bill Richardson,
the U.S. Energy Secretary, and Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia's Prime Minister.
Mr. Kuchma delivered a televised address to mark the occasion.

"This is a date which will go down in the history of Ukraine and the world,"
he predicted. "Today, I gave the order to shut down the third reactor of
Chernobyl, the last one still operational. This means the closure of an
installation which has entered history as the worst catastrophe, which had
the most terrible consequences.

"What is Chernobyl for Ukraine?" he asked. "It's almost three-and-a-half
million victims of the catastrophe and its consequences. Almost 10% of our
territory tainted by radiation; 160,000 people who had to leave the places
where they were born and move elsewhere."

One in every 16 Ukrainians and millions of Russians and Belarussians still
suffer health disorders as a result of the Chernobyl meltdown. In Ukraine,
cases of thyroid cancer have surged 100-fold in some areas.

Three million children require treatment as a result of the disaster,
thyroid cancer among adolescents has jumped tenfold in some affected areas
and birth defects and growth problems in Ukrainian children have more than
doubled.

By some counts, 30,000 people have died as a result of the accident and
ecologists worry nuclear-contaminated runoff from Chernobyl may work its way
into the nearby Dnieper River and eventually the Black Sea, poisoning a
watershed that provides nine million Ukrainians with drinking water.

But yesterday, on Mr. Kuchma's command, Sergiy Bashdovy, a 30-year-old
engineer, turned a switch marked BAZ, short for "rapid emergency defence,"
and sent containment rods sliding into the reactor core to stop the nuclear
reaction at Chernobyl's last functioning reactor.

Yesterday's shutdown was brokered as part of a US$2.3-billion aid package
from the world's richest countries.

In exchange for closing Chernobyl, Western nations, including Canada, have
promised to help Ukraine build replacement reactors elsewhere.

Chernobyl's No. 2 reactor was destroyed in a massive fire in 1991, while the
No. 1 reactor was closed in 1996 after a series of failures and small leaks.
The remaining No. 3 reactor had been plagued by minor accidents and
technical glitches and had been operating only intermittently since Dec. 6
because of a radioactive leak in its cooling system.

Chernobyl's last reactor provided Ukraine with 5% of its electricity. Its
closure yesterday will ultimately cost 6,000 people their jobs.
************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html