While later contested, it's not only "Russia" which estimated 4000 deaths. Wikipedia states the United Nations took part in the joint group, and

> "[...] worked to establish international consensus on the effects of the accident via a series of reports that collated 20 years of research to make official previous UN, IAEA, and World Health Organization (WHO) estimates of a total of 4,000 deaths due to disaster-related illnesses."

In fact, the sentence you quoted states:

> "[...] there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of deaths due to the disaster's long-term health effects, with estimates ranging from 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia), to no fewer than 93,000 (per the conflicting conclusions of various scientific, health, environmental, and survivors' organizations)."

So it's not just Russia.

anyway, it's much lower than death caused by burning coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

Yes.

I think it's important the keep the hyperbole to a minimum, if we're truly interested in safe energy and in understanding this accident and its impact. Speaking of millions of deaths, as if it were proven fact, or getting our knowledge from sensationalized miniseries, is doing a disservice to both the Chernobyl disaster and the topic of nuclear energy.

It's unfortunate that people still point to Chernobyl as why we should never go back to nuclear power ever again.

Taking in mind that the human population living in the area has sinked, and that Prypiat has been a ghost town eating money for 33 years, I can understand the general lack of enthusiasm for repeating the Chernobyl experience at home.

How many Chernobyls would it take to equal the damage that is already inevitable from global warming? That's a serious question. It can be answered by comparing number of deaths, number of people displaced, or economic and political disruption, but no matter how you calculate the answer, the result is that Chernobyl is a tiny event by comparison.

Given the extent of tourism into the exclusion zone (myself visiting Prypiat in 2017), I wouldn't be surprised if the town itself actually made money and if (excluding opportunity cost and the costs of Sarcophagus) the whole Zone was net-profitable now.

Well, If you exclude costs in your formula, all is benefit. This is true. Lets talk about the costs.

The economic damage caused by Chernobyl in 30 years is estimated in 235 Billion of dollars.

Source Belarus Foreign Ministry: http://chernobyl.undp.org/russian/docs/belarus_23_anniversar...

This includes destroying trust in Ukrainian agriculture for 30 years and removing also a good chunk of lands suitable for agriculture in a country previously called "The Breadbasket of Europe (and soviet countries)".

I would expect also huge maintenance bills for a long time. The cost of the new sarcophagous and auxiliary buildings is estimated in 2.3 Billion dollars extra.

Plus increase of health services and cancer surveillance checks in nations affected by the disaster (like Ukranie, Belarus or Russia, but also Polland or Germany). Belarus registered a x40 increase in children's thyroid cancers since the accident.

Ukraine and Belarus still need to spend more than 5% of its annual budget in benefit payments to compensate 7 million people for the accident. In whole, Belarus pays around $1 million at day for Chernobyl

Plus the cost of vigillance of the restricted area to avoid garbage collectors (if not, mafias could load trucks with free metal scraps and sell it in Moscow, Berlin or Paris for example), or keeping unauthorized adventurers from doing stupid things.

Plus the cost of the damaged nuclear central itself that lose a quarter of its planned energy production for 15 years and is not producing any energy since the year 2000; only debts.

Taking all of this in mind, As thematic park and bussiness, Chernobyl is a ruinous one. Is a nice continental nature park, the first in the world, but apart of that is a ruinous adventure.

We shouldn't contrast fossil to nuclear energy but both to renewables.

In other words, stop burning things to get energy, for fossil energy because of the carbon dioxide and for nuclear energy because long-term storage of wastes is an unsolved problem. I am surprised again and again that people propose nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. Don't they know we will come out of the frying pan into the fire with nuclear energy? Enough said.

Edit: I should not have been so inflammatory, sorry for that. So let me retry:

We shouldn't contrast fossil to nuclear energy but both to renewables. We really should go out of both coal and nuclear.

In other words, stop burning non-renewable things to get energy, for fossil energy because of the carbon dioxide and for nuclear energy because of the long-term storage of waste.

You rejected a primary source and proposed a secondary source of amateur curation?

There are all sort of statistical outliers when looking at cancer rates around the rest of Europe. See, for example, testicular cancer in Swiss men in 1987/1988:

https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1131635837878362112?s=21

> while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000".

that is on the right scale. The Gomel and Mogilev regions of Belarus took the brunt of the fallout, and the cancer rates there is significantly higher. For example, the rate of the breast cancer (the most frequent cancer - normally more than 1 in 10 women would get it during lifetime) is 2x there (so with total 1M+ women living in those 2 regions more than 100K of them would get the breast cancer due to Chernobyl). In general, comparing Belarus cancer rates to Russia, Ukraine, Poland - the surrounding countries with a lot of similarities wrt. environment, ethnicity/DNA, lifestyle/unhealthy habits/etc. - Belarus gets about 10K extra cancer cases per year (with about 50% mortality).

Belarus is different from its neighbors in more significant ways than its proximity to Chernobyl; it's famously "the last dictatorship in Europe". Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it's economy has been weaker than its neighbors, as has its ties to the European Union.

That isnt a factor here for at least two reasons: 1. It doesn't have geographical distribution correlation that the Chernobyl fallout has with the cancer rates increase. 2. The Belarus per-capita GDP is more than 2x that of Ukraine.

I believe much of that drop is due to the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, followed by the invasion of Donbass. The drop off can be seen in the link below starting in 2014 when the invasion was initiated:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

You're technically correct (depending on where you find the GDP data), but I don't believe it would be the case if the invasion and annexation had not happened. The numbers prior to 2014 show Ukraine with a much higher GDP than Belarus

>The numbers prior to 2014 show Ukraine with a much higher GDP than Belarus

Not really. Even back then the Ukraine per capita was still noticeably below Belarus - having 4.5x population it had 3x GDP at best.

Anyway, my point is that the macro-economical/macro-social things like for example per-capita GDP or government style have nothing to do with cancer rates there (overwise Poland, Russia, Ukraine would have huge differences among themselves), and definitely those macro-factors dont have geographical distribution like Chernobyl fallout to explain the Belarus cancer picture.

Here's a pretty detailed report on health care in Belarus from 2013:

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/232835/H...

Of note:

* Rates of smoking in Belarus are also high.

* The indirect impact of Chernobyl includes a lack of health care facilities in the (rural) regions most impacted.

If the stat you're working from was breast cancer mortality, I'd push back harder, but I don't think that's what you're saying.

> * Rates of smoking in Belarus are also high.

Russia and Poland have higher rates of smoking. Anyway, it would be mostly about lung cancer which isn't the main component here.

> * The indirect impact of Chernobyl includes a lack of health care facilities in the (rural) regions most impacted.

Lack of healthcare facilities doesn't really impact cancer incidence rate.

>If the stat you're working from was breast cancer mortality, I'd push back harder, but I don't think that's what you're saying.

Breast cancer incidence rate is the main component here. It shows the largest increase in absolute terms. Thyroid cancer shows largest percentage increase, though it is "just" a 1K of cases. Geographically correlates with fallout too.

So far i really fail to see how any argument you've put forward can explain such a significant and regionally (Mogilev and Gomel are large regions, so it is not some local effect) regionally correlated increase in the cancer rate. Especially given that those regions received several Hiroshimas worth of fallout which explains that increase perfectly.

So your explanation need to be at least as good as the Chernobyl fallout provides. Specifically any such explanation has to account for the observed size of the rate increase as well as its geographical distribution, i.e. it should clearly answer - "why Gomel and Mogilev?"

Smoking is closely linked to some forms of breast cancer.

I'm not trying to push hard on a particular argument here.

>Smoking is closely linked to some forms of breast cancer.

the smoking rates among women in Belarus is ~10%. To account for the breast cancer rate increase in the Gomel and Mogilev regions all the women smokers there would have to get the breast cancer. Add to that that women smoking rate for example in Russia is close to 20% and the breast cancer rates there are relatively normal. Given all that it is pretty obvious that smoking has nothing to do with that cancer rate increase in Gomel and Mogilev regions .

Indeed. Also, stands to reason that breast cancer incidence rate is less correlated with standard of living or availability of healthcare than mortality rate. (Unless the society is so primitive that cancer mortalities don't get counted)

Poland is also a neighbor of Belarus and a former Eastern Bloc country. But I will cop to not researching this carefully; if I had the comment to write over again, I would have stopped at "last dictatorship in Europe".

I have never been to Belarus or Ukraine and have no real desire to, though Poland is pretty high on my list.