The event that is collectively known as “Chernobyl” was little more than a minor industrial accident. However 37 years after the incident it is still labelled as a “catastrophe”. Why is that?
What catastrophe? The only catastrophe of that particular event was other countries sticking their noses into the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. Something that seems to be a daily preoccupation.
Imagine the scene:
Phone rings. Someone answers.
– “um, mister USSR person, we have detected radiation at our facility so we’re checking if anything has happened”.
– “No. Mind your own business”.
– “Please tell us, we’re scared”.
– “Sorry we forgot that you have this insane aversion to a perfectly good source of energy. Yes, one of our power stations blew up. What’s the problem?”.
– “But our cows in Sweden now glow in the dark”.
– “Really? Have you checked? Sorry we can’t help your lack of critical thinking. Call me in 37 years and let’s discuss then”.
There is no call back.
You can now take Chernobyl tours. The wildlife is thriving. Reactors 1, 2 and 3 continued to operate after #4 went offline and they went on to provide enough energy for 2,000,000 homes or about 5,000,000 people.
Based on the work of Harvard, this saved the lives of about 6,000 people every year from the clean air that Chernobyl provided after the incident.
When Reactor 4 imploded and in the cleanup efforts only 31 people perished. In the 37 years since, the collective “we” struggle to find any evidence of trans-national transgressions. Even local ones.
Chernobyl Bore
The once famed Chernobyl Tissue Bank, previously housed at the prestigious Imperial College in London and led by former antinuclear but now pronuclear advocate, Professor Geraldine Thomas found nothing. George Monbiot – once a leading Greenpeace member and their biggest anti-nuclear spokesman – interviewed Professor Thomas for a planned hit piece on Chernobyl. Two weeks after the interview – and following getting the Chernobyl data – he dropped out of Greenpeace decrying the obvious fraudulent activities of Greenpeace against nuclear energy. Mr. Monbiot has been a strong pro-nuclear advocate ever since.
Chernobyl Wolves
Professor Thomas has since stepped aside as head of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and the think tank has moved from Imperial College, UK to Maryland, USA. It is now under the control of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) – obviously an independent body. Previously the Chernobyl Tissue Bank presented factual studies, data, evidence and its management structure clearly. Now it’s merely a mouthpiece of the Organised Opposition to nuclear power energy with its management hidden behind a series of “committees and panels”.
Chernobyl Pheasant
The Chernobyl “story” as a catastrophe is a farce by any account of reasonable and rational introspection. It is still being milked by the organised opposition to scare people away from secure, reliable Fission energy, because that opposition has so much to lose. Much like the well managed – though media bashed – release of cooling water in Fukushima happening now on the other side of the planet. There is no issue there either.
Chernobyl Pigs Roaming Free
Here are some real catastrophes still happening every day:
8.5 million people perishing every year due to burning of fossil fuels (PM2.5, NOX and CO) Recent Harvard work explains this.
8 million people each year from smoking cigarettes (a hazard something known for 100 years. Even women where tricked into smoking in a clever psychological spin using feminism as its leverage).
1.35 million people perish each year due to road accidents. Is there a fatal flaw in our society’s makeup – or our minds – to accept that?
500 million deaths and incapacitations in total (including IQ loss) from the fossil fuel industry’s saving compound tetraethyllead (TEL). Little tip. TEL is still being used today. Don’t hang around private airfields if you want your kids to grow up smart.
Chernobyl Buffalo
As for industry catastrophes, here are some real ones. No nuclear anywhere.
Failure of Banqiao Dam and 60 Other Dams, China (1975): An estimated 240,000 deaths.
Amphitheatre Collapse, Italy (AD 27): Over 20,000 deaths.
Machchhu Dam Failure, India (1979): 10,000 deaths.
Benxihu Colliery Explosion, China (1942): 1,549 deaths.
Rana Plaza Collapse, Bangladesh (2013): 1,134 deaths.
Courrières Mine Disaster, France (1906): 1,099 deaths.
Mitsubishi Hōjō Coal Mine Disaster, Japan (1914): 687 deaths.
Chernobyl Mink Safe From Humans
The Russian’s, those operating Chernobyl, didn’t think much of sharing the news of losing one of their power plants. Because it frankly wasn’t anybody’s business. They weren’t hiding anything. Even 37 years later we search and search for the numbers to quantify the qualification of “a catastrophe”.
Chernobyl Power Plant – 6,000 Lives Saved Every Year
But the search continues in vain. Ironically the same can be said for so-called radiation deaths from the purposeful bombing of Japan by the USA in 1945 using nuclear weapons. Massive fire and heat killed thousands of women and children. But radiation incorrectly takes the blame.
Signs for Humans Not Animals
So, fancy a bit of midweek popcorn entertainment. Dial up Chernobyl on HBO and let the fantasy take you away from your real concerns. The ones we seem to want to simply ignore.
A photo taken on January 22, 2016 shows wild Przewalski’s horses on a snow covered field in the Chernobyl exclusions zone.
In 1990, a handful of endangered Przewalski’s (Dzungarian) horses were brought in the exclusions zone to see if they would take root. They did so with relish, and about a hundred of them now graze the empty but sustenant fields. Przewalski’s horses are the last surviving subspecies of wild horse. / AFP / GENYA SAVILOV (Photo credit should read GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)
For a sobering reminder of the perils of human society you can review these lists.
Though an ideal energy source, nuclear made an unfortunate entry into world affairs. Accompanied by frightening tales of destruction it failed early on to gain the confidence required of a leading contributor to future human prosperity. Is radioactivity and nuclear radiation particularly dangerous? It has been wielded as a political weapon for 70 years. But does the myth of a possible radiation holocaust have objective substance? The inhibition that surrounds nuclear radiation obstructs the optimum solution to real dangers today – climate change, the supply of water, food and energy, and socio-economic stability.
Is radioactivity and nuclear radiation particularly dangerous? It has been wielded as a political weapon for 70 years. But does the myth of a possible radiation holocaust have objective substance?
Professor Wade Allison
Primary Energy Sources
By studying the natural world, humans have succeeded where other creatures failed. Satisfying our needs depends on understanding the benefits that nature offers. In particular, the study of energy and the acceptance by society of improved sources have been critical to prospects for the human race several times in the past. The first occasion was pre-historic, perhaps 600,000 years ago, when fire was domesticated. Confidence and good practice spread through the use of speech and education. Then came the harnessing of sunshine and the weather, delivered by windmills, watermills and the growth of food and vegetation. Nevertheless, these energy supplies were weak and notoriously unreliable. Additional energy was routinely provided by slave labour and teams of animals. Generally though, life was short and miserable.
The use of fossil fuels and their reliable engines began in the 18th Century and displaced the use of intermittent sources. Life was transformed for those who had the fuels. Health, sport, holidays, leisure and human rights flourished, all previously unavailable. Political affairs were largely concerned with which people had access to fossil fuels. Though fossil fuels were never safe or environmental, their combustion probably triggered, if not caused, changes to the climate. Consequently, the decision was taken in Paris in 2015 to discontinue their use. What should replace them? And how may we live in a climate that is never likely ever to revert to the way it was?
Fortunately, natural science today has a firm and complete account of energy – that is apart from one or two intriguing cosmological goings-on such as “dark matter”. Secondary sources, such as hydrogen, ammonia, batteries, electricity and biofuels, are beside the point, because they need to be generated from some primary source, and it’s the latter we need to secure. The weak, unreliable and weather-dependent primary sources that failed previously continue to be inadequate. Without fossil fuels, that leaves only one widely available source, sufficient to support the continuation of society as we know it, namely nuclear energy[1]. It ticks every box, except that many know little about it and are wary of it.
One who learnt early was Winston Churchill. In 1931 he wrote prophetically in the Strand Magazine that nuclear energy is a million times that of the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution[2].
One who learnt early was Winston Churchill. In 1931 he wrote prophetically in the Strand Magazine that nuclear energy is a million times that of the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution[2]
Professor Wade Allison
Both chemical and nuclear energy can be released explosively. Unfortunately, it was as a weapon that many in society first heard about nuclear energy. Released in anger at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the combination of blast and fire produced was fatal to the majority of inhabitants within a mile or two. Those much further away were not affected, nor were those who came to the site weeks afterwards. The result of the nuclear bombs was similar to the destruction by conventional explosives and fire storm in WWII of Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden – or by explosives in recent years of Chechnya, Aleppo and Mariupol – except that it may come from a single device.
It comes as a surprise to many people that nuclear radiation makes no major contribution to the mortality of a nuclear explosion, even in later years[3]. That is not what they have been told. What is the truth and why has it remained hidden?
A great deal has been learnt about the effect of radiation on life in the past 120 years. When nuclear radiation was discovered by Marie Curie[4] and others in the last years of the 19th Century, they took great care to study its effect on life. Shortly thereafter, high doses were used successfully to cure patients of cancer, as they still are today. Millions of people have reason to be thankful as a result.
As with any new technology, much was learnt from accidents and mistakes in the early days. But by 1934 international agreement[5] had been reached on the scale of a safe radiation dose, 0.2 roentgen per day – in modern units, 2 milli-gray (or milli-Sievert) per day. In 1980 Lauriston Taylor (1902-2004), the doyen of radiation health physicists, affirmed[6] that “nobody has been identifiably injured by a lesser dose”– a statement that remains true today.
At first sight it is strange that ionising radiation, with its energy easily sufficient to break the critical molecules of life, should be harmless in low and moderate doses. And it does indeed break such molecules indiscriminately, but living tissue fights back because it has evolved the ability to do so. In early epochs the natural radiation environment on Earth was more intense than today. Life would have died out long ago, if it had not developed multiple layers of defence. These act within hours or days by repairing and replacing molecules and whole cells, too. Control of these mechanisms was devolved to the cellular level long ago, and it is a mistake for human regulations to try to micromanage the protection already provided by nature. So, although the details of natural protection and its workings are still being discovered today, the effectiveness of the safety it provides were known and agreed already in 1934.
But then in the mid-1950s, in spite of initiatives like “Atoms for Peace” by President Eisenhower, human society lost its nerve about nuclear energy and its radiation. What went wrong?
But then in the mid-1950s, in spite of initiatives like “Atoms for Peace” by President Eisenhower, human society lost its nerve about nuclear energy and its radiation. What went wrong?
When fear hid the benefits of nuclear and its radiation
Few today are old enough to remember those days, as I do. The 1950s was an unpleasant time with military threats abroad, spying, secrecy and mistrust at home. In the USA it was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy[7] when all manner of innocent people were accused of being communist sympathisers or Soviet agents. Suspicion was everywhere. Already following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowledge of nuclear radiation was seen as a “no-go” area, supposedly too difficult to understand and beyond the educational paygrade of normal people. After the War a vast employment structure, the industrial military complex, continued to develop, test and stockpile nuclear weapons to the horror of large sections of the populace, worldwide. They were supported in their concern by many scientists, including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Andre Sakharov and many Nobel Laureates. Whether they were knowledgeable in radiobiology or not – and few were – they did not trust the judgement of the military and political authorities with this new energy and its million-fold increase. Everybody was frightened that the power might fall into foreign hands or be used irresponsibly by allies. This fear increased after 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device[8]. As the years went by, ever larger popular marches and political demonstrations attempted to halt the nuclear Arms Race with the USSR, frequently alarming civil authorities with their threats to law and order.
This civil disturbance had more success in stopping the Arms Race when it focused on the biological effects of nuclear radiation. Few in the industrial military complex knew much about this – they were mostly engineers, physical and mathematical scientists. In truth, few other scientists did either and in the absence of data were easily alarmed. The concern was that irreparable radiation damage incurred by the human genome might be transmitted to subsequent generations. Such a prediction was made by Hermann Muller, a Nobel Prize winning geneticist – without any evidence. A ghoulish spectre of deformed descendants was eagerly adopted by the media as real. The popular magazine Life, dated May 1955 page 37, explicitly quoted Muller, saying “atomic war may cause” such hereditary damage (emphasis added). The qualification of the possibility was lost on the media and general public – the horror was seen as just too awful. It was widely taken as likely to be true by academic opinion, too, as there was no evidence to deny it.
Herman Muller, LIFE Magazine, 1957
Significantly, it is not difficult to detect levels of radiation exposure many thousand times lower than the level accepted as safe in 1934[5]. Anxious to quell popular pressure, regulatory authorities acceded to a regime in which life should be spared any radiation exposure above a level As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA). For the public, the advice was set at 1 milli-Sievert per year, a modest fraction of the typical natural background received from rocks and space. National regulatory authorities, concerned to protect themselves from liability, readily adopted the advice of the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP) under the auspices of the United Nations.
These regulations are based, not on evidence, but on a philosophy of caution, namely that any exposure to radiation is harmful and that all such damage accumulates throughout life – in denial of the natural protection provided by evolution. A discredited ad hoc theory of risk, the Linear No Threshold model (LNT)[9,10], supplanted the Threshold Model of 1934 at the behest of the BEAR Committee of the US Natural Academy of Sciences in 1956.
A discredited ad hoc theory of risk, the Linear No Threshold model (LNT) [9,10], supplanted the Threshold Model of 1934 at the behest of the BEAR Committee of the US Natural Academy of Sciences in 1956.
Professor Wade Allison
Such excessive caution incurs huge extra costs. Worse, adherence to ALARA/LNT regulations has caused serious social and environmental damage – for instance, in the response to the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. International bodies and committees, unlike individuals, stick rigidly to their terms of reference. So, the ICRP still supports ALARA/LNT today[11] and advocates protection which is not necessary – except in extreme cases.
What about these extreme cases? Muller supposed that an exposure to radiation can alter a person’s genetic code and that this error can then be passed onto off-spring. But the medical records of the survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their children and grandchildren[12] never supported this. As a result, nobody today maintains that there is any evidence for such inheritable genetic changes. This is confirmed in animal experiments, and was accepted even by the ICRP in 2007[11] – to be precise they lowered their estimated genetic risk factor by an order of magnitude. So Muller was wrong[10]. Incidentally, he was also wrong about the evidence for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1946.
So Muller was wrong [10]. Incidentally, he was also wrong about the evidence for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1946.
Professor Wade Allison
Dedicated to protect people against radiological damage, the ICRP focused on the induction of cancer by radiation instead of inheritable genetic defects. The medical history of 87,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with their children, have been followed since 1950. Data on solid cancers and leukaemia in 50 years and their correlation with individually estimated exposures have been published by DL Preston et al ([13], Tables 3 and 7). Inevitably, some survivors died from these diseases anyway, but their numbers are allowed for by comparing with distant residents who received no dose, being too far away. Some 68,000 survivors received a dose less than 100 milli-Sievert and these showed no evidence of extra cancers. Altogether, between 1950 and 2000 there were 10,127 deaths from solid cancers and 296 from leukaemia – 480 and 93, respectively, more than expected on the basis of data for those not irradiated. This number of extra deaths, 573, is significant, but less than half a percent of those who died from the blast and fire. Furthermore, it is only a third of the number of deaths reported as caused by the unnecessary and ill-judged evacuation at Fukushima Daiichi[14], an accident in which nobody died from radiation, or is likely to. Evidently, the fear of radiation can be far more life-threatening than its actual effect, even as recorded in the bombing of two large cities. This conclusion in no way belittles the enormous loss of life from the blast and fire of a nuclear explosion with its localised range and limited duration.
The medical history of 87,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with their children, have been followed since 1950.
Professor Wade Allison
But it is important to check that all available evidence corroborates this conclusion. How are other biological risks checked? A new vaccine is checked with blind tests in which patients are unaware of whether they have been treated or been given a placebo. In similar studies with radiation on groups of animals[15], one is irradiated every day throughout life and the other not. Those irradiated daily show a threshold of about 2 milli-Sievert per day for additional cancer death or other life shortening disease, similar to the threshold set in 1934. In fact doses below threshold increase life expectancy and the same is found for humans[16].
At Chernobyl 28 fire fighters died of acute radiation syndrome in a short time[17], 27 from doses above 4000 milli-Sievert and 1 from a dose between 2000 and 4000 milli-Sievert. There were 15 deaths from thyroid cancer (but opinion is divided on these). Other cases of ill health were related to severe social and mental disturbance. Being told “you have been irradiated and are being evacuated immediately” is disorientating. Like Voodoo or a mediaeval curse, it can be life-threatening. Notably, the wild animals in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are thriving, as seen on wildlife programmes[19, 20] – but then they have not been shown videos on the horrors of radiation!
An important question is how human society has persisted with such a gross misperception for seventy years. Entertainment, courage and excitement are important emotional exercises that prepare us to face real dangers, although there is a need to distinguish fact from fiction. The Placebo Effect describes the genuine health benefits found by patients who think they have been treated when they have not. The Nocebo Effect is its inverse[21], that is where people who have not been harmed, suffer real symptoms as if they had. In the aftermath of the Fukushima accident families endured terrible suffering including family break up and alcoholism – as a direct consequence of regulations based on ALARA and LNT. If the regulations had been based on the 1934 threshold, no evacuation longer than a week would have been justified[22].
The nuclear option for generations to come
Evidently, committees that advocate regulation based on ALARA/LNT are harmful and should be disbanded. Future generations should be free to make informed decisions involving nuclear energy, in peace or war, unencumbered by the erroneous legacy of the 1950s.
Evidently, committees that advocate regulation based on ALARA/LNT are harmful and should be disbanded.
Professor Wade Allison
In years to come, when reference is made to the “nuclear option” in other contexts, we may hope that it will be shorthand for “the best solution”. In medicine this is nearly true now. During a course of radiotherapy the healthy tissue close to a tumour receives a high dose – about 1000 milli-Gray, every weekday for several weeks. By spreading the treatment over many days, this healthy tissue just recovers, and radiologists ensure that this huge dose seldom causes a secondary cancer. This would be disastrous strategy according to LNT – in six weeks or so the equivalent of about 30,000 years at the precautionary dose limit of 1 milli-Sievert per year!
Future generations should be free to make informed decisions involving nuclear energy, in peace or war, unencumbered by the erroneous legacy of the 1950s.
Professor Wade Allison
In future we should not allow ourselves to be blackmailed by fear of the radiation from a nuclear weapon. That may have terrified our parents, but we should ensure that our children understand that radiation is dangerous only in the immediate vicinity of a nuclear detonation where death is caused by the blast and fire. At school all teenagers should study natural science and understand how nuclear energy compares with other sources, for safety, availability, reliability, security and preservation of the environment[1]. Then they should go home and reassure their parents.
In future we should not allow ourselves to be blackmailed by fear of the radiation from a nuclear weapon.
Professor Wade Allison
Professor Wade Allison, Oxford, United Kingdom, 20 September 2022
National Research Council (1956). Effect of Exposure to the Atomic Bombs on Pregnancy Termination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18776 .
Olipitz W et al, Integrated Molecular Analysis Indicates Undetectable Change in DNA Damage in Mice after Continuous Irradiation at ~ 400-fold Natural Background Radiation (2012) https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104294
Report of the UN Chernobyl Forum Expert Group “Health”, Health effects of the Chernobyl accident and special health care programmes, World Health Organisation (2006) https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241594179
No other technology produces energy as cheaply, safely and continuously on a large scale as nuclear power. No other energy source can match nuclear power’s low environmental impact, partly because its energy density is a million times greater than that of fossil fuels – and more so for wind or solar.
As of 2016, the world’s 400 + nuclear reactors created about 15% of our electricity. France, alarmed by the cost of petro-fuels, went to 70% nuclear in just 16 years, and Finland, now at 30%, is aiming for 60%. Sweden is adding 10.
Nuclear France emits about 40 grams of CO2/kWh, but Germany, the US, Japan and most industrialised nations emit 400 – 500 grams per kiloWatt hour – ten times more per kWh than heavily nuclear France. Compared to fossil fuel-reliant wind and solar farms, nuclear power is a gift from the energy gods.
Nuclear power, being CO2-free, is by far the most effective displacer of greenhouse gases, so how can my fellow “greens,” oppose nuclear power when the environmental costs of burning carbon-based fuels are so high?
Dr. James Lovelock, a patriarch of the environmental movement, has begged people to support nuclear energy: “Civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear power, the one safe, available, energy source now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by an outraged planet.”
“In the core of just one reactor, the power density is about 338 million watts per square meter. To equal that with wind energy, which has a power density of 1 watt per square meter, you’d need about 772 square miles of wind turbines….
“Some opponents still claim that nuclear energy is too dangerous. Debunking that argument requires only a close look at the facts about Fukushima….
“Here’s the reality: The tsunami caused two deaths – two workers who drowned at the plant.
“It was feared that radiation from the plant would contaminate large areas of Japan and even reach the U.S. That didn’t happen. In 2013, the World Health Organization concluded: ‘Outside of the geographical areas most affected by radiation, even within Fukushima prefecture, the predicted risks remain low and no observable increases in cancer above natural variation in baseline rates are anticipated.
“High on my list of well intentioned dupes are those who praise science and are eager to confront Climate Change but refuse to accept nuclear power as an essential part of carbon-reduction strategies. They dismiss new reactor designs that they don’t understand, and then talk about how wind and solar power can ‘supply our needs.’
“They are wrong, but nuclear can supply our needs when people conquer their fears, educate themselves on the safety of nuclear power – and constructively join the fray. Until they do, they must accept their culpability in creating an overheated planet with millions of climate refugees.”
Only at the “illegal” plant at Chernobyl, which was designed to also make plutonium for bombs, with electricity being a by-product, has anyone died from radiation from nuclear power, but we’ve had tens of millions of coal, gas and petroleum-related, early deaths. Furthermore, our reactors, by generating electricity from the 20,000 Russian warheads we purchased in the Megatons to Megawatts program, have become the ultimate in weapons-reduction techniques.
What about 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima? We’ll examine each of them, but it is important to remember that nuclear plants have been supplying 15% of the world’s electricity, while creating no CO2, for 16,000 reactor-years of almost accident-free operation. And the reactors that have powered our nuclear Navy for more than 50 years have similar safety records. (Naval reactor fuel can be up to 90% U-235.)
In March, 1979, two weeks after the release of the popular movie, The China Syndrome, a partial meltdown of a reactor core due to a stuck coolant valve and design flaws that confused the operators, caused mildly radioactive gases to accumulate inside one of the reactor buildings.
After the gases were treated with charcoal, they were vented, and a small amount of contaminated water was released into the Susquehanna River. No one died or was harmed.
However, when an AP reporter described a “bubble” of hydrogen inside the reactor building in a way that led people to think that the plant was a “hydrogen bomb,” many residents fled, which caused more harm than the accident.
In fact, radiation exposure from Three Mile Island was far less than the amount of radiation that pilots and airline passengers receive during a round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles [1 mrem, or 1 microSivert – 100 times less than average yearly background exposure in the area around Three Mile Island]. Furthermore, in the following decades, more than a dozen studies have found no short or long-term ill effects for anyone, whether they were downwind or downstream from the plant or at it – and since then, operator training and safety measures have greatly improved.
President Carter—who had specialized in nuclear power while in the United States Navy—told his cabinet after visiting the plant that the [Three Mile Island] accident was minor, but reportedly declined to do so in public in order to avoid offending Democrats who opposed nuclear power.
Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program [55 years safe operation], so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
Despite all of the fear and panic, nothing happened. No one died, and no one got cancer, but the media-hyped event at Three Mile Island came very close to shutting down all progress in American nuclear power. Because of the radiophobia generated by our sensation-seeking press and fervent greens, neither of whom bothered to check the facts, many proposed reactors were replaced by coal plants, and in the following decades, pollution from those plants brought premature death to at least 500,000 Americans.
In 1986, during a test ordered by Moscow that involved disabling the safety systems, a portion of the core of the reactor, which had design hazards not present in Western reactors, was inadvertently exposed. (The RKMB reactor at Chernobyl was long judged to be dangerous by scientists outside of the Soviet Union.)
As Dr. Spencer Weart wrote in The Rise of Nuclear Fear, “In short, for Soviet reactor designers, safety was less important than building ‘civilian’ reactors that could produce military plutonium if desired, and building them cheaply.”
This negligence led to a steam/hydrogen explosion that released radioactive gases into the atmosphere because the reactor had no effective containment structure. In contrast, no U.S. reactor contains flammables. Each has a reinforced concrete containment structure that can survive an airliner hit, and every plant is strictly regulated by the NRC.
There has never been a source of energy as safe or kind to the environment as nuclear power, and the reason for the safety is regulation.
Every responsible nation similarly regulates its nuclear power plants and shares information and training practices via international agencies. This cooperation, which was expanded after Three Mile Island, resulted in so many improvements that civilian nuclear power climbed from 60% up-time in the sixties to at least 90% today.
For three days, Soviet authorities hid the [Chernobyl] disaster and delayed evacuating the area, coming clean when radiation readings across Europe began to rise. (The government also failed to distribute iodine tablets, which could have protected thousands from airborne Iodine-131, which is readily absorbed by the thyroid, particularly in the young. (A body with an abundance of benign I-127 is less likely to absorb I-131.)
Chernobyl failed due to bad design, Moscow’s interference, poor training and a system that forbade operators from sharing essential information about reactor problems. It is the only “civilian” reactor accident where radiation directly killed anyone. Initially, approximately eighteen firefighters died from intense radiation. Yet, with design changes and proper procedures, several similar reactors still operate in the former Soviet Union.
Metsamor, a nuclear power plant in Armenia, (former USSR), also has no containment structure. The European Union has urged Armenia to close down the site for years, and offered $289 million to finance shutting down the plant…
(A round trip flight for the U. S. to Chernobyl will expose travellers to twice as much additional background radiation as their 2-day tour in the exclusion zone, which even includes a tour of the damaged plant).
Furthermore, the deformed and brain-damaged “Chernobyl children” that sensation-seeking TV programs occasionally feature are no different from similarly afflicted children elsewhere in Europe who received no fallout, but that information is never provided by anti-nuclear activists and the media. (Since Chernobyl, cancer rates in the Ukraine have been about 2/3 of the rate in Australia.)
Because of the erroneous, dangerous LNT theory and many dire predictions from people like Helen Caldicott (coming up in future episodes), many thousands of badly frightened European women endured needless abortions because they had become convinced that they were carrying monster babies.
Tepco’s Fukushima reactors began operation in 1971 and ran safely for 40 years, generating huge amounts of electricity without creating any CO2 or air pollution, but then, in 2011, came a record-setting earthquake – Tōhoku.
However, the quake destroyed the plant’s connections to the electrical grid, which required emergency generators to power the systems that cooled the still-hot reactors.
Although three of Tepco’s six nuclear reactors were off-line when the quake struck, five were eventually doomed because: 1. In 1967, Tepco removed 25 meters from the site’s 35-meter seawall to ease bringing equipment ashore. 2. Tepco replaced the original seawall with only a six-meter seawall. 3. The Japanese government advised Tepco to raise it, but Tepco declined – and the government did nothing. 4. Tepco had inexplicably placed five of its six emergency generators in the basements. 5. The tsunami flooded all but #6. 6. Batteries powered the controls for about 8 hours, and then failed. Without coolant, meltdown was assured.
Reactors 1 – 4 are useless, and number 5 is damaged, but reactor 6 was unaffected because its back-up equipment was intelligently sited well above the tsunami’s reach. Reactor 6 is capable of producing power, but it has not been started, largely because of the anti-nuclear hysteria fanned by most of the Japanese press.
There were warnings: All along the coast, ancient “Sendai stones” have been warning residents to avoid building below 150 feet above sea level for centuries.
The Onagawa nuclear plant, which was closer to the epicenter of the quake, also survived the quake, and its 45-foot high seawall easily blocked the tsunami. The tsunami took more than 15,000 lives, but Fukushima’s seawall failure took the lives of just two workers who drowned.
The Thorium Network 
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