georgeob1 wrote:The short term consequences of Chernobyl were in the hundreds of deaths; 40 or 50 from the fire and explosion; others from radiation exposure, mostly in the immediate containment activities.
The short and middle term consequences of Chernobyl has been 59 deaths, dixit WHO (see above link), NOT hundreds of deaths.
And the consequences of radiation would have been much less if it weren't the soviet style handling of the accident, where people were not evacuated and given iodine pills on time and dairy products in the vicinity of Chernobyl were used days after the accident.
The WHO has made high estimates of the number of radiation casualties based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it is shown to be far fewer than the "lofty" numbers of Greenpeace. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has lowered the life expectancy in the region (-10 years for men !) as everywhere in the whole communist empire much more surely than Chernobyl which has made a precise accounting of the accident consequences particularly difficult.
If a nuclear accident must mean something, we can take a more representative example of
western plants with Three Miles Island. The core has melted. The double hull has made its protection role. There was zero radiation leak and nothing has changed with the population which live neaby. This is an inconvenient truth for the anti-nuclear folks, so inconvenient they never mention it.
