Radiating half-truths

'Doom soon' generation can heave sigh of relief, thanks to Chernobyl Forum, an int'l organisation of scientific bodies including UN agencies.

The ‘Doom soon’ generation can heave a big sigh of relief, thanks to the Chernobyl Forum, an international organisation of scientific bodies including UN agencies. It has reportedly found that the world has been living on edge for 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster for nothing, and that fears of Chernobyl’s radiation fallout killing tens of thousands and triggering a wave of slow and painful cancer deaths across Europe have probably been misplaced. In fact, the death toll directly caused by radiation from Chernobyl currently stands at an astonishing 56, which, the researchers point out, “is less than the weekly death toll on Britain’s roads”.

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This agrees with available scientific evidence that rules out any cancer risk at radiation doses below 100 milliSieverts a year. On the contrary, at low levels of exposure, the body’s natural repair mechanisms seem to be adequate to repair radiation damage to cells soon after it occurs. Although ionising radiation was considered a scientific miracle until the end of World War II, subsequent development of nuclear weapons and increased use of nuclear power changed this into radiophobia, with even tiny doses of radiation triggering fear. Which probably prompted Cassandras to base their predictions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where the levels of radiation exposure were often in the range of thousands of milliSieverts). The unexpected outcome of Chernobyl would suggest the need for some moderation in all of today’s various doomsday scenarios, as well as the need for better methodology in the forecasts — oil depletion, bird flu, asteroid strike or the destruction of biodiversity. Malthusian forecasts of global population outstripping the planet’s food supplies to cause worldwide famine and death from starvation, were, after all, unfounded.