Chernobyl’s Hidden Impact: Disinformation and Nuclear Politics

And yes it is oxymoronic to have the same agency being responsible for safety and promotion of nuclear power

Chernobyl is not the past.

every nuclear power plant ever built assumes there will never be a war on the site.

April 26 2025 , https://paxus.wordpress.com/2025/04/26/chernobyls-hidden-impact-disinformation-and-nuclear-politics/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ-qChleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFBSUs5cEUwaHVhSmt1NE11AR5WmsYFgugAy3502vFG3fKu80SWDxjhbNp8xXETEZ7ygNIrwakT8SZAx_iycg_aem_rCKscMA_09VKeljU4_Bisw

Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Mikhail Gorbachev who was the last leader of the Soviet Union and was in power during the meltdown. But perhaps the more important lesson from the Chernobyl catastophe is that disinformation can kill you. It is important to remember that the largest and most deadly nuclear accident in the world was not even reported initially by the secretive and corrupt Soviet Union. It was not until 2 days after the meltdown that the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden detected the radiation and forced the Soviets to admit there had been an accident. Forsmark is 1100 km from Chernobyl.

Disinformation about Chernobyl is not confined to the Soviet Union, western nations and especially the UN played a critical role in down playing and distorting information about the effects of the disaster. This is most obvious in the fatality estimates associated with the catastrophe.

In 1959, the powerful UN agency responsible for both promoting and monitoring nuclear power, the IAEA, signed an agreement with the UN’s health monitoring agency, WHO, that restricted them from reporting on nuclear accidents. And as part of the western public relations cover up, 4 months after the meltdown the then general director of the IAEA, Hans Blix, would affirm: “The world could tolerate a nuclear accident as serious as Chernobyl every year.” WHO was blocked from releasing any independent Chernobyl studies and ultimately the IAEA (with WHO) would officially report that there were only between 4000 to 9000 deaths. [And yes it is oxymoronic to have the same agency being responsible for safety and promotion of nuclear power.]

Consensus is not your friend. There have been many scientific studies of the affects of Chernobyl. Greenpeace did an anthology of these studies at the 25th anniversary and estimated that at least 93,000 people will have died and the actual total is likely well be over 200,000 premature deaths. Why the big difference between the UN’s official tally and independent scientists? The answer is consensus. The IAEA has representatives from pro-nuclear states on it’s Chernobyl Forum, they release their reports operating by consensus and those invested in nuclear energy have a strong interest in down playing the effects of accidents. Independent scientists have also found radiation levels in the exclusion zone to be over three times higher than the IAEA reports.

How effective is this western mis/disinformation campaign? Check out Wikipedia or ask any AI. You will quickly find the IAEAs 4000 person fatality rate. Depending on the source more accurate information is either buried or not revealed in your first responses. Lots of people on the nuclear payrolls have put a bunch of effort into minimizing the impact of all nuclear accidents. This is not a (known) conspiracy, per se, but rather contemporary industrial capitalism functioning as designed. But perhaps more revealing is that almost no mainstream news sources are covering this years 39th anniversary. Far more important in our attention economy is that Trump is going to the Pope’s funeral and we are arresting judges in the US.

Chernobyl is not the past. In February of this year a relatively low cost attack drone blew a hole in the second $1.7 billion Chernobyl sarcophagus. The fire from this attack burned for 3 weeks, requiring technicians to make further holes in the exterior shell in a high stakes game of “nuclear whack a mole”

“We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen,” said a senior technical adviser on the project. “We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn’t consider acts of war.”

It is worth pointing out that every nuclear power plant ever built assumes there will never be a war on the site. Assuming otherwise would be yet another in the long list of reasons why nuclear power should not be considered or continued. Other major problems with civil nuclear power include: subsidized insurance, proliferation risks, uneconomic construction and operation, perverse effects on avoiding climate disruption and the threat to democracy. The total cost of the Cheronbyl accident has been estimated at $700 billion which is about 5 times the Ukraines average GDP for the last 10 years.

The only good nuclear news on this anniversary is the complexity of nuclear power plants combined with the previous globalization of the nuclear construction and fuel supply chain mean that Trump’s tariffs may put the breaks on any new nuclear construction in the US. Or perhaps more sadly, these Trump taxes will just increase the already ridiculous price of nuclear power to both taxpayers and ratepayers.