Re: 16th Anniversary of Chernobyl accident

[maury <maury@WEBTEXAS.COM>]

Bill, I imagine Jim Muckerheide. will respond to the questions you raise, but

I'd like to insert a few thoughts of my own. I really hope that you will have

the time to go through a lot of the reference material provided by Muckerheide.

Those references will provide good answers. I have tried in good faith to read a

lot of the literature on Chernobyl because the whole accident is so intimately

associated with a gross abuse of science for political and monetary ends. Thus

far I believe the only deaths attributed to the event were about 30 killed in

the initial explosion and about 70 more who died as a direct result of the

containment and cleanup efforts after the explosion.



The intensive follow-up studies by UNSCEAR led to the estimate in UNSCEAR Report

2000 of the 1800 thyroid cancers in youngsters. In addition, that numerical

estimate is expected to grow a bit more, but to my knowledge, no cancer deaths

have yet been found that can reasonably be attributed to the explosion or its

aftermath. I'm confident that you and I would agree that surely it is possible

that a few deaths have or will occur. But how might we single out and identify a

few individual cancer cases in the US specifically attributable to one of the

test shots in the Pacific?



A major problem in all of the work after Chernobyl has been the absence of good

data in the former Soviet Union to permit before and after comparisons. Serious

valid questions have been raised concerning the simple existence of Russian

screening data prior to Chernobyl. In your very first reference, the authors

cited before and after frequencies, but the "before" data are questionable. Then

more detailed assertions are made such as, "... more aggressive at presentation

..." and so on; there is a problem with 'more aggressive than - compared with

what?



Bill, the confounding of money, politics, and science with Chernobyl is simply

humongous (if you will forgive my slang). It has been made into a giant money

machine by means of a huge victim industry. The immediate surrounding

governments have collected tremendous sums of money from the rest of the world

for remediation, and so on. A variety of groups have been formed to collect

money for the "victims" and their families. How much of the money gets beyond

the administrative expenses of the groups is not known. Then you have further

promotions by groups who simply wish to denigrate anything nuclear which

produces childish slogans like "mobile Chernobyl" and tooth fairy projects.

Years of scientific work by UNSCEAR scientists and technicians have concluded

that there were about 100 fatalities.  But  these other groups who have obvious

vested monetary and political (power) interests are claiming 30,000 fatalities,

untold numbers of deformed children, and millions of people who are ill from

radiation. I think you will agree that these latter groups seem interested in

transporting a mobile Chernobyl straight into the land of the tooth fairies for

all of the money and political support they can muster. And they do it on each

anniversary of the event - especially on the 5, 10, and 15 year milestones. (See

the Radsafe archives surrounding April-May 2001).  I think one of Muckerheide's

references contains a detailed expose of some of these distortions.



Bill, at one point recently, two non-scientific agencies of the UN itself had

joined the clamor for funds and assistance to remedy the horrifying Chernobyl

disaster. This got so bad and so completely false that UNSCEAR finally lodged a

formal protest with the Secretary General of the UN. Jeez! Talk about the right

hand not knowing what the tooth fairies were up to .... Anyway, that foolishness

was stopped. You might have noticed an earlier post about the upcoming 16th

anniversary (26 April) of the Chernobyl explosion - it will be interesting to

see what happens in the world press again this time.



Please forgive my hot air, but the Chernobyl episode has become a tremendous

distortion of a serious scientific and engineering endeavor. Mistakes can be

fixed, but dishonesty acquires a long life of its own.

Sincerely,

Maury Siskel               maury@webtexas.com

===========================================

"R. William Field" wrote:



> Jim,

>

> I am not sure I accept your claim that there were no thyroid cancer related

> deaths related to the Chernoby accident.  Did I read your post correctly?

>

> It is my understanding that approximately 1,800 thyroid cancers have been

> diagnosed in individuals who were children at the time of the accident

> (could someone verify this estimate?).  It is also my understanding that

> following Chernobyl there has been a higher incidence of differentiated

> thyroid carcinomas which are much more aggressive than the common type of

> thyroid cancer.  I  would expect that approximately 10 - 15% of all the

> thyroid tumors would be classified as differentiated thyroid carcinoma.

> Approximately 10% of differentiated thyroid carcinomas result in death

>

> A few papers of interest.

>

> World J Surg 2000 Nov;24(11):1446-9

> Thyroid cancer in children of Ukraine after the Chernobyl accident.

>

> Rybakov SJ, Komissarenko IV, Tronko ND, Kvachenyuk AN, Bogdanova TI,

> Kovalenko AE, Bolgov MY.

> Department of Surgery, Institute of Endocrinology, 69 Vyshgorodskaya

> Strasse, 254114 Kiev, Ukraineraine.

>

> The results of treatment of 330 children (< 14 years) and adolescents (15-18

> years) with thyroid cancer who were operated on at the Institute of

> Endocrinology after the Chernobyl accident in 1986 were analyzed. The number

> of young patients increased after 1986 (1981-1985, 9 cases; 1986-1990, 37

> cases; 1991-1995, 177 cases; 1996-1998, 116 cases). Most of these children

> and adolescents were younger than 8 years at the time of the accident

> (84.2%). More than half of the children (58.1%) lived in areas receiving the

> highest radiation exposure. These thyroid cancers developed after a short

> latent period, were more aggressive at presentation, and expressed regional

> (57.3%) or distant (14.5%) metastasis. Solid papillary cancers were present

> in 93.1%. Coexisting thyroid conditions were common (thyroid hyperplasia,

> 25.1%; nodular goiter, 18.8%; chronic thyroiditis, 10.2%). Most patients

> were treated by total thyroidectomy with intraoperative visualization of

> recurrent laryngeal nerves and parathyroid glands. When lymph node



-----------------------------------  snipped

---------------------------------------



************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/