Hold on.

The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported. And deaths don't cover the full "cost" of Chernobyl. Displacing thousands of people lead to poverty, depression and suicide. The economic and social damage was huge. The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.

I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union. This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.

If you look at it from that perspective: No, I don't think that a hurricane hitting Houston would be as damaging as Chernobyl and cause the United States to collapse.

>I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union. This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.

You're not helping your argument when you make it sound like a bold new theory and use (good) TV fiction to bolster it up. I propose a quote from a certain Mikhail Gorbachev instead:

> He states flatly that the Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Gorbachev, the Chernobyl explosion was a “turning point” that “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.”

https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/chernobyl-and-the-fall-...

But note that here it's more about how Chernobyl exposed deep dysfunctions within the Soviet system and how it might have contributed to precipitate its collapse. I don't really know if that counts as "damage".

The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just happen to have finished reading it) is that the public damage and cost from Chernobyl was so unprecedented and spectacular in scope that it was impossible for the Soviet government to cover it up. And that what makes this remarkable is how this incident compared to other past incidents (not to mention purposeful engineering efforts) that the Soviet government had successfully managed to cover up and keep from the population. In other words, “exposed the dysfunction of the system” is accurate, but also incomplete. It omits the reason why this particular disaster, and not other disasters, was the trigger that caused this reckoning.

And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.

"Here's more evidence to support your idea" is perhaps the pettiest possible retort. Is agreeing with someone so hard?

Re-reading my comment I can see how it could be interpreted that way, I meant it more as playful jab but such are the woes of a textual medium...

I just thought it was amusing to present that theory in that way, when it's been brought up by Mr СССР himself.

I didn't want to make it sound like it's a new theory at all. I applaud your addition with the quote and I didn't read it as negatory at all.

His comment is actually a very good reply to the grandparent, which was making a poor job of supporting the argument.

Also, your accusation of his comment being petty is pretty ironic.

It's not that surprising that the cause of the Soviet Union's collapse tries to pass the blame elsewhere.

Without Chernobyl, but with Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.

Without Gorbachev's reforms, but with Chernobyl, the Soviet Union would still exist, just as PRC did not collapse from Tiananmen Square and DPRK did not collapse from 1990s famine.

> The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported.

Maybe, if you only take the 31 number, that one is indeed grossly underreported. But any other estimate (like the common 4000 number) is really a wild guess. The reason is not Soviet Union keeping secrets, but more fundamental, it's really really hard to give any meaningful estimate in a situation like this even with 100% transparency.

> I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union.

In that case, it was a net win.

That 4,000 is estimated based on just radiation to a small area and was never intended as any kind of a total.

long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

What’s more concerning is limiting things to deaths as if that was the only form of harm. People can survive cancer, but not without economic, emotional, etc harm. Further, giant exclusion zones and ongoing mitigation efforts are extremely expensive.

4,000 is based on a conservative linear-no threshold model across all irradiated populations [1].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

The UNSCEAR is a UN group of scientists who study radiation, similar to the IPCC group studying climate. The fringe studies from Greenpeace and friends claiming more than 4000 deaths do not carry more weight than the UNSCEAR numbers.

Just to clarify what "conservative" means here.

Oversimplifying, if you distribute the radiation that was released evenly in a group of 8000 persons, each one has a 50% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.

If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 80000 persons, each one has a 5% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.

If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 8000000 persons, each one has a 0.05% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 death.

But in the 8000000 group the radiation level is too low and there is also normal background radiation, and other normal risk, so the real number is probably less than 4000 deaths.

In a realistic scenario, some people get more radiation and some less radiation, but the nice part of the simplified model is that it always predict 4000 deaths. But this number is like an upper bound, the real number of deaths is probably less.

There is evidence that the linear no threshold model both over estimates and under estimates the increase in cancer deaths among humans.

The disagreement stems in part from the extremely high rate of cancers and thus precancerous tissue among people which means than some tissue is unusually vulnerable. This is supported by skin cancer rates. The opposite conclusion is based on cellular responses to low level radiation exposure, which may provide protection from future exposure.

If it was actually clear LNT was a bad model we would be using something else, but it’s not obvious which direction it should be updated. Presumably, the reality is some non linear effect relating to lifetime exposure for radiation and other cancer risks, but collecting accurate data is difficult.

It’s important to understand the context for what’s being said. “given the low doses received by the majority of exposed individuals, any increase in cancer incidence or mortality will be difficult to detect in epidemiological studies.”

Detecting an increase in cancer deaths from a specific source when cancers represent 1 in 6 deaths worldwide is extremely difficult. If cancer killed 100 people per year then detecting an increase of ~X00 extra deaths per year would be much simpler. On the other hand try to isolate ~1 extra cancer death per 10,000 deaths is a pipe dream.

>This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.

You're talking about a TV show meant to entertain and generate buzz and word of mouth. It's not meant to be taken as an actual explanation. The theories of a TV show, no matter how grounded in reality, shouldn't be trotted out as examples when we have the actual reality and facts the TV show is based on.

In a time when facts are freely available to everyone, people are pointing to entertainment as data points into how we should make policy. It's embarrassing to see.

> The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.

The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because Soviet Union doesn't exist.

>The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.

The soviet union didn't have stats on this because they knew those stats would make them look bad long before (and regardless of whether or not) the reactor went pop.

Chernobyl was not their first round with that sort of disaster. It was however the first 'public' one.

What's the evidence of this? Is the theory that there was a meltdown in Siberia or something where there aren't many neighbors to notice?

There's the Kyshtym disaster:

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

The Soviets were also even less careful than the US about tests of high nuclear yield weapons.

That is assuming you trust Soviet stats on Chernobyl deaths.

I’m acquainted with one of Russia’s chief oncologists, who was one of the primary physicians that dealt with the consequences of Chernobyl. She’s been quite clear that the number of people affected is both large and well-suppressed.

Of course, the very nature of “the state makes sure not to collect damaging statistics” means I can’t actually quantify the real harm done. For all I know, maybe it’s just equal to ‘two’ bad train wrecks.

Under Stalin, statisticians who collected the "wrong" values were likely to come to a very nasty end - I imagine something like that leaves a lingering fear in any society/profession:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937)

Naive way of looking at it, Chernobyl caused huge changes to the way of life for many people, not only in the vicinity, I live in Sweden and I remember that day when it rained and how we decades afterwards sent meat, berries and other food stuff for testing ....

I still remember standing under an arch in the Grassmarket Edinburgh on my way back from University classes on the day that the Chernobyl cloud passed over the UK and looking at the heavy rain and wondering whether it was a wise thing to walk home in it.

Edit: Of course I knew there was a tiny tiny risk - but still something I remember thinking about.

> ...decades afterwards sent meat, berries and other food stuff for testing ....

What did they find? How bad was the impact?

I think you're still advised not to eat boar meat in Austria because of the radiations. This is an article from 2011 [1] documenting the fact, and this is a study from 2019 [2] which found that:

> The caesium levels of 8 wild boar and 11 roe deer samples exceeded the limit out of the 490 specimens

Now, 19 out of 490 specimens exceeding the Cs-137 concentration level limits is too high a percentage for me, but maybe other people are willing to take more risks in this area compared to me.

[1] https://www.medindia.net/news/wild-boar-meat-in-austrian-sup...

[2] https://www.ages.at/en/topics/radiation-protection/caesium-1...

It was pretty bad, high values of mostly cesium-137 in local food. Now some 35:ish years afterwards, its mostly reindeer that goes over the recommended thresholds.

>What did they find?

They found that keeping testing going this century serves the valuable function of keeping the public at ease and the cost isn't that high (testing is pretty small scale now) so why not keep it.

The primary source of radiation was airborne dust (and therefore precipitation as well). Crops and farm raised animals have been clean for a long time. The primary risk is shooting a buck that ate a berry that had something nasty on it back in 1995 but between the half lives of the radioactive compounds in question and the pattern of events required to get those components to one's dinner plate the risk is beyond minimal at this point.

There has been about a 1000 deaths attributed to it in Sweden.

And you could argue that its "low", but its in the very sense "Russian roulette", you never know if it is you, maybe you where unlucky and ate a side of that wild boar that contained 39706 becquerel per kilo...

You're saying there have been 1000 deaths from Chernobyl in Sweden? That goes strongly against the UN-sanctioned scientific consensus of the radiation effects of the accident [1].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

The "Russian roulette" hypothesis is unsupported at dose rates near natural background radiation. For example, the natural background dose varies widely around the world, and we have not found a statistically link between high background areas (like Denver) and low background areas.

Radiation at low levels has been around for billions of years. Life evolved with it and can handle it to a degree. So the idea that a tiny bit more radiation is dangerous is wrong because of our repair mechanisms.

And if you take the value of land into account? Chernobyl displaced a lot of people and cost a lot of money

In direct deaths, Chernobyl didn't cause that many but I have seen estimates of the cancer toll that are a lot higher than most accidents

Most of those estimates haven't held up, after this many years those deaths should be noticeable. The only cancer they can observe Chernobyl having an effect is thyroid cancer, which kills very few people.

> which kills very few people.

I really don't understand the exclusive focus on deaths here. Cancer and genetic deformations can make your life hell even if they don't cause death.

It is not an exclusive focus on deaths, it is on all cancers and they did not spike as claimed by more pessimistic models. There were a few slight increases (mostly in thyroid cancer) but also a lot more testing being done that makes it a bit harder to normalize the statistics -- this may also have dropped the death rate slightly, as cancers caught early due to increased testing are more likely to be treatable.

Do you mean the number of death because of Tchernobyl is negative (less death than if Tchernobyl did not occur) ?

No, I am suggesting that part of the reason the death rate is much lower than predicted is that the testing rate has gone way up (and stayed up as testing became better and cheaper) and treatments have improved significantly, so incidences of cancer that might have been discovered late with few treatment options in the 90s are now detected early and treated as a chronic condition. More deaths overall, but a lot less than what was expected.

If you live in the fallout region then you are going to be placed in a high-risk category and are going to be watched more closely for cancer than the general population. By observing something we change it.

Most of the cancer treatments that make your life hell aren't commonly used on thyroid cancer. Generally you have part of the thyroid removed, and quite often it can safely be ignored with no harm done to the patient.

What about child birth defects ?

I don't think the UN team was able to attribute any child birth defects to increased radiation. The horror books with pictures of them are shock collections of deformed children. It's possible that the rampant alcoholism of the latter Soviet era was the likely cause.

Alcoholism causes birth defects? How?

A simple google search will bring up hundreds of articles linking alcohol consumption during pregnancy to birth defects. It is a well established relationship.

In the US we even have warnings on all alcoholic beverages that say pregnant women should not drink alcohol.

I looked at the CDC's page (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/alcohol-use.html). It contains a number of very negative effects from drinking alcohol while pregnant. But because the context was birth defects caused by radiation, I was thinking more in terms of visible deformities - which can be caused by radiation, but which are much less significant from alcohol.

Perhaps I was being too limited in my concept of "birth defects" - including for radiation. If the radiation while pregnant (or before) gives the child cancer at five, is that a "birth defect"? Maybe not, in the way I was thinking, but I can see how it might be thought of that way.

What childbirth defects?

I'd rather have 50,000 displaced than 5,000 dead. Being dead is pretty bad vs displaced. I move around a lot; although I can see the argument it is bad it is not a fate worse than death.

If Oroville Dam had given way back in 2017 that could easily have been America's Chernobyl. It made for exciting news.

I found your comment quite cynical and hand wavy. The nuclear fallout affected a huge area and still impacted parts of central Europe. This goes hand in hand with increased cancer rates. Yes, better than dying immediately, but still not a fate you would wish upon anybody.

> I move around a lot

Others don't.

Also, did you into account all the indirect effects of radiation?

This is like saying than Kalashnikovs clubbing people to death are rare events, so they are very safe.

Having cancer death after ten years, because radiation was released, is a direct death. Direct origin, direct cause, Wouldn't be happening without the event. This child would had born normal. This woman would not die in an hospital at 52 years old.

We have registered increases in thyroid cankers, we have plenty of healthcare centers data showing that something abnormal is still happening with this population. Is embarrassing to see nuclear related people claiming after all this years that, if you can't trace it, is not their problem, specially when half of Europe was about to be seriously poisoned forever.

How is viewing Chernobyl from that angle useful in this context?

The Houston Ship Channel has the potential to become an environmental disaster similar to Chernobyl, but affecting the fourth-largest population and economic center in the US.

It's not hyperbole -- if you drive down 225 and 146 from Houston to Galveston, it feels like you're in the Sonic the Hedgehog Chemical Plant Zone... it just goes on and on at an unbelievable scale. It self-perpetuates partially because expanding existing petrochemical complexes seems to meet less opposition than building new ones.

https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+ship+channel+plants&...

https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7348066,-95.1345542,13223m/d...

Chernobyl is a lesson not because what it was, but what it could have been. Only miracle (Legasov ans Sherbina being honest and persistent people) saved the damn thing from polluting whole Europe. Train wreck is a train wreck, it is limited in terms of destruction it can produce.

Not really. In hindsight, many of the efforts like digging under the reactor and dropping lead from air were of questionable usefulness at best. In their defense, they acted according to the information and resources they had, but all in all the mitigation efforts gave unnecessary radiation exposure to many people and many of them were completely useless. If the reactor were left alone for a while, it wouldn't have changed much.

Yes exactly. The next accident might be different. You will never know if it will have contaminated the ground water or not, what are the necessary steps to prevent spread of the radiation. So yeah, it is not what it was, but what it might have been.

My mother was a child in Poland during the Chernobyl disaster. In her family nobody has a history of cancer but she had breast cancer. And a lot of other health issues. Coincidence? Maybe.

I'm sorry for your family's health problems. I'm also sorry if this comes off a bit crass considering, but this mysterious thought process of radiation is exactly why we need to focus harder on epidemiological studies of radiation effects. By your exact same argument it could easily have been the successful reactor safety test in Idaho that happened 2 weeks before Chernobyl that caused your mother's health issues. It's far to easy for any of us to magically attribute something with another without looking at the big picture. The scientific method offers us a way to tease out which hunches like this are real and which are fantasy.

Fact is, we use epidemiology to understand these things, and the jury is in [1].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Anecdotally, my college girlfriend was a child in Gomel Belarus during Chernobyl. Her father had a Geiger counter and took readings around here. There was lots of elevated dose rates. She is perfectly healthy to this day though!