Chernobyl’s “liquidators” not compensated for radiation caused cancers

neither governments nor nuclear industries have provided any significant funding for researching more controversial health effects of radiation such as breast cancer and heart disease. Whenever you hear that “there are no studies proving any connection between radiation and [insert medical condition]”, you can be pretty sure it’s because no studies have actually been done……

Nuclear Family Bonds, Open Salon 25 Aug 11, “…..Japan has supported Chernobyl studies and projects in Ukraine for years. Though one people suffered from the Bomb, and the other, a civilian nuclear plant explosion, both were bound by scars of the atomic age. That both, after Fukushima, are now also victims of the “peaceful atom” is almost getting weird. No two peoples could seem further apart in their stereotypes than the productive and dutiful Japanese from the ne’er do wells of post-Soviet Ukraine .

….But they actually have more in common than you might think.

The world’s worst (so far) nuclear disaster happened in what was then the Soviet Union 25 years ago. Ukraine inherited it along with independence. It also bore the brunt of the clean up. Of 829,000 “liquidators” (so called because they were supposed to be “liquidating the consequences of the accident”, in the official parlance) from throughout the USSR, nearly half came from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic….

That’s the opinion of Yuri Andreyev, the head of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Union, a non-governmental group for liquidators. As a 35-year-old engineer, he was in the control room 12 hours after the explosion hit Unit 4. “Only 20,000 people, maybe 30,000 did any good at Chernobyl,” he said in the Union’s modest three-room office, where employees bring their own lunch and anyone with a Chernobyl problem is welcome. The rest – more than 800,000 people – were sent there just to prove that the Communist government in Moscow was “doing something”. Their radiation exposures were completely unnecessary.

Some studies show liquidators have worse health than the general population. But the research is sufficiently flawed for the Ukrainian authorities to deny that specific illnesses were caused by radiation exposure and thus avoid paying for medical treatment. While Chernobyl’s 8000 thyroid cancers are well studied, neither governments nor nuclear industries have provided any significant funding for researching more controversial health effects of radiation such as breast cancer and heart disease. Whenever you hear that “there are no studies proving any connection between radiation and [insert medical condition]”, you can be pretty sure it’s because no studies have actually been done……

That’s the problem with nuclear energy. The industry has always treated safety as a PR problem, as though any admission that the technology was not perfectly safe would lead to the closure of every single plant tomorrow. Well, Fukushima showed that it isn’t perfectly safe and that disasters will happen. No one is even pretending otherwise anymore. And yet, the nuclear plants are still running and will continue for some time.–

http://open.salon.com/blog/mary_mycio/2011/08/25/nuclear_family_bonds

September 1, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Ukraine

1 Comment »

Reuters data reports show US nuclear power plants outages were twice as high as they were last year, and over on this blog…

Comment by nicloans danny | March 5, 2012 | Reply

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope