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Region’s death toll from Chernobyl nuclear accident close to 1 million

Chernobyl exploded in a remote backwater of an impoverished region. But by official accounts from Ukraine and Belarus, it did $500 billion in damage just there. Nowhere in the US would the property damage be remotely that small. The near-million death toll would be a mere fraction of how many would die here.

Chernobyl demands a REAL climate bill, THE FREE PRESS, Harvey Wassermann, April 26, 2010 “…….after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.

The authors include Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the president of Russia; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist who was, at the time of the accident, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The book has been edited by Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist expert in the health impacts of radioactivity.

As Karl Grossman has shown, Chernobyl’s death toll stretches worldwide. Its apocalyptic cloud blanketed Europe and blew across the northern tier of the United States. Sheep in Scotland and milk in New England were heavily contaminated, along with countless square miles of land and sea. …

It’s precisely that dangerously deficient AP-1000 design that the Obama Administration wants to fund first, for construction in Georgia. America’s leaky fleet of 104 aging clunkers meanwhile staggers toward disaster at places like Vermont Yankee and New York’s Indian Point, Ohio’s Davis-Besse and California’s Diablo Canyon.

Chernobyl exploded in a remote backwater of an impoverished region. But by official accounts from Ukraine and Belarus, it did $500 billion in damage just there. Nowhere in the US would the property damage be remotely that small. The near-million death toll would be a mere fraction of how many would die here.

Nothing in any known draft of this now-in-limbo climate bill demands private insurance against such a catastrophe. Nor does it have a solution for what to do with 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste, or thousands more yet to come. ….. The Free Press — Independent News Media – Harvey Wasserman

April 26, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine | antinuclear, cancer, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear technology, nuclear wastes, radiation, reactor, reactors