The truth about Chornobyl: some don't want to know the truth (05/19/96)

The truth about Chornobyl: some don't want to know the truth

by Dr. David R. Marples and John D. Miller

Several prestigious publications have recently made an absurd claim: radiation from the Chornobyl accident 10 years ago did little harm to human health. Instead, victims' irrational fears of radiation have caused almost all resulting illness. The London Sunday Times, The New York Times and The Economist have all endorsed this view as fact.

But it is not fact. The unseen hand behind all three articles is the international radiation health establishment, an anachronistic vestige of the Cold War. As people who aided bombmakers, nuclear power plant owners and medical radiologists, its practitioners have always been strongly motivated to underestimate the health consequences of radiation. The truth might have put them out of business.

Because of their inside access to radiation-producing governments, the International Commission on Radiation Protection and its national affiliates have dominated worldwide regulation of radiation. As a result, the United States Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, have never funded open scientific debate about radiation health effects. They have forced out employees who dared speak out.

These agencies' "experts" told us in 1952 that a yearly dose equal to 300 current chest X-rays was safe, but now they restrict us to one-fifteenth that amount each year. The United Nations and British committees agreed with critics that there is no safe dose, no matter how low, but the Americans refuse to believe it.

The 1991 "expert" study of Chornobyl's consequences was sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose U.N. charter orders it "to accelerate and enlarge the contributions of nuclear power" worldwide. Ten to 15 percent of downwind residents still needed medical treatment, 200 international experts concluded, but only because of groundless radiation fears. Radiation harmed no one.

But the "experts" were wrong. They missed the beginnings of a thyroid cancer epidemic that has since welled to 1,000 cases. They also intentionally left out the people most contaminated by Chornobyl radiation: the 800,000 decontamination workers and 130,000 evacuated residents.

According to Prof. John W. Gofman of UC Berkeley, a fatal flaw guaranteed their study would find no link between radiation and illness. Since no one had measured radiation levels everywhere, the experts tried to reconstruct the four-year accumulated dose of a few thousand residents. But daily changes in the wind and the mix of elements the reactor spewed out in the first two weeks made that impossible. Unknowable large, early doses dwarfed long-term doses. The "experts" found no link only because their "reconstructed" doses were meaningless guesses.

The Chornobyl disaster contaminated an area larger than New Zealand, over 100,000 square kilometers. More than 300,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, many forced to live in badly constructed buildings without heat, water or adequate sewage facilities.

Most victims of Chornobyl no longer receive compensation. Governments in the heavily affected territories - Belarus and Ukraine - are in no position to continue financing Chornobyl-related problems. One official noted that meeting Chornobyl victims' 1996 needs would cost 20 percent of Ukraine's annual budget. Last year's expenditure was 3.4 percent.

The initial fallout of radioactive iodine has caused a leap in thyroid diseases in these two countries. The soil is iodine-deficient, hence children's thyroid glands were especially susceptible to radioiodine. Prior to Chornobyl three or four children a year got thyroid cancer. Today the annual two-country rate is over 150, and the disease has not peaked. The noted Cambridge University specialist, Dillwyn Williams, warns that all children in contaminated regions are at high risk.

Clean-up workers suffer from various health problems. Most have skin, respiratory and digestive diseases. Their leukemia rate is double that of the whole population and rising. Six thousand Ukrainian workers alone have died, many from heart attacks brought on by stress.

Chornobyl's effects have exacerbated a general crisis in health care. Since 1986 these two countries have been experiencing an alarming increase in infectious diseases. They now suffer double the rate of infant mortality of the United States, and male lifespan has dropped to less than 60. Their populations are shrinking.

"Experts" maintain these developments are unrelated to Chornobyl. This is a myth. Chornobyl has affected popular lifestyles in virtually every aspect. In contaminated zones visited last year, local farmers acknowledged they have "lived off the land" since Chornobyl. Most cannot afford to do otherwise. In other cases mothers have been opting for abortions rather than families, aware of widespread congenital defects.

According to one survey, over 52 percent of people living in contaminated regions suffer from "psychic disorders," "psychological fears and tension." Soviet authorities dismissed such fears as "radiophobia." The reality is that the population has no faith in its future. Regional officials cannot resolve its problems, and international experts maintain there are no problems to resolve.

Yuri Shcherbak, Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, told an international conference that to deny Chornobyl has caused a health crisis in Ukraine is akin to denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps.

If 10 years later there is no consensus about the impact of Chornobyl, one must conclude that some people do not wish to know the truth. The lessons of Chornobyl are being ignored.

Dr. David R. Marples is a professor and director of the program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He has authored three books on Chornobyl. John Dudley Miller is a nuclear engineer, a social psychologist, and a science reporter and producer residing in Cleveland. This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times on April 26.

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