GoKawiilChernobyl was the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster. The reactor was built to a flawed design. In 1986, its operators disabled automated safety systems and removed control rods to perform a late-night test. The coolant water overheated, speeding up the reaction until it flash-boiled into steam and violently shattered all the nuclear fuel in a matter of seconds. The graphite in the reactor then caught fire.
Six hundred workers were present when this occurred. Of these, 134 received high doses of radiation, between 800 and 16,000 millisieverts, mostly within hours. Twenty-eight of these died in the first three months, and another 19 died before 2004, though not all from radiation-related causes. While first responders have shown a slight increase in rates of leukemia, there has been no increase in solid cancers.
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When the reactor exploded, it released massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. This ash settled onto the grazing regions of Ukraine. Dairy cows ate it and secreted it into their milk. Every person who drank this milk ended up with some quantity of radioactive iodine concentrated in their thyroid gland. Since children have smaller thyroids, their effective doses were much larger. The hundreds of thousands of children exposed have been closely screened in the years since, and authorities have identified 6,000 thyroid cancers. Fifteen people have already died of these cancers, and 200 might in the long run. These thyroid cancers were completely avoidable because the iodine has a half-life of eight days. After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm.
Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby. Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory. Evacuations and relocations to avoid small additional background radiation levels may have caused more harm than they averted. The same is true of Fukushima and Three Mile Island, the other two large nuclear disasters, but to an even greater extent: neither saw any responders die of the direct effects of radiation, and neither shows any clear impact on cancer rates.
Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses.
Whereas Chernobyl is a household name, Bhopal and Banqiao are mostly familiar only to specialists. People have much greater familiarity with and concern about the risks created by nuclear power, and the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology.
The idea that any release of radioactive material is an intolerable disaster rests on the claim that radiation is harmful even in small, spread-out doses. But this claim is not well supported. The studies that claim to show harms from slow, drawn-out ionizing radiation are unconvincing. By giving them undeserved credence, we may be foreclosing one of the world’s most powerful technologies.
Trouble in Taipei
Between 1982 and 1984, recycled steel contaminated with cobalt-60 was unknowingly used in the construction of more than 180 buildings in Taiwan, including schools, businesses, and approximately 2,000 apartments. Cobalt-60 emits deeply penetrating gamma radiation, which in high doses is fatal: in 2000, three people died from acute radiation poisoning when a Thai scrap merchant took apart a radiotherapy machine containing large amounts of it. Over two decades, more than 10,000 people occupied these buildings, receiving an average total radiation dose of 400 millisieverts, about seven times more than the average American would receive over the same period from background radiation. This makes the Taiwanese buildings a good test of the claim that chronic background radiation at low daily rates damages human health.
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