On the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, I was standing at a
public meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, listening to the story of one of the firemen
employed to clean up the site after the explosion. These workers took huge doses
of radiation during this task, and their story is a terrifying one. About
600,000 men were conscripted as Chernobyl `liquidators' [also called
bio-robots']: farmers, factory workers, miners, and soldiers -- as well as
professionals like the firemen -- from all across Russia. Some of these men
lifted pieces of radioactive metal with their bare hands. They had to fight more
than 300 fires created by the chunks of burning material spewed off by the
inferno. They buried trucks, fire engines, cars and all sorts of personal
belongings. They felled a forest and completely buried it, removed topsoil,
bulldozed houses and filled all available clay-lined trenches with radioactive
debris. The minimum conscription time was 180 days, but many stayed for a year.
Some were threatened with severe punishment to their families if they failed to
stay and do their duty.These `liquidators' are now discarded and forgotten, many vainly trying to establish that the ill health most have suffered ever since 1986 is a result of their massive exposure to radiation. At the Centre for Radiation Research outside Kiev, there is an organization of former liquidators. This group reports that by 1995, 13,000 of their members had died- almost 20 percent of which deaths were suicides. About 70,000 members were estimated to be permanently disabled. But the members of this organization are the lucky ones. Because many former liquidators are now scattered throughout Russia, they neither have the benefit of the organization's special hospital, nor of membership of a survivor organization. They are known as the `living dead.'
The fireman whose story I was listening to seemed to be an exception to this grim litany of illness and death. He was telling the meeting how pleased and excited he was that, for the first time in ten years, his blood test findings were in the normal range. I was standing next to a delegate from the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] -- the organisation charged with promoting the use of atomic energy. On hearing the fireman's story, he leaned over to me and said: "You see! We said these were only transient disorders." A rough translation might read: Chernobyl? What's the problem?
Ignoring the Victims
The IAEA man's attitude was perfectly in keeping with that of his organization which, along with the International Commission on Radiation Protection [ICRP] exists in practice largely to play down the effects of radiation on human health, and to shield the nuclear industry from compensation claims from the public. The IAEA was set up in the late 1950s by he UN, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to promote the peaceful use of atomic energy -- ironically, two contradictory objectives. The ICRP which evlved from the 1928 International Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection, was set up in the fifties to explore the health effects of radiation and [theoretically] to protect the public from it. In fact, both organizations have come to serve the industry rather than the public.
The Chernobyl case is a classic example of the IAEA's inadequacy and questionable science. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, not least from the many thousands of victims themselves, the IAEA insists that only 32 people have so far died as a result of Chernobyl -- those who died in the radiation ward of Hospital six in Moscow. All other deaths related to the disaster and its aftermath [and there have been many more than 10,000 in Ukraine alone according to the Minister of Health there] are ignored. Belarus had the highest fallout, and yet there is an international blackout among the IAEA and the rest of the "radiation protection community" on the suffering of its people
The essential problem is that both the IAEA and the ICRP are dealing not with science but with politics and administration; not with public health but with maintaining an increasingly dubious industry. It is their interests, and those of the nuclear industry, to play down the health effects of radiation.
Restrictive Definitions
The main way in which the "radiation protection industry" has succeeded in hugely underrating the ill-health caused by nuclear power is by insisting on a group of extremely restrictive definitions as to what qualifies as a radiation-caused illness statistic. For example, under IAEA's criteria:
- If a radiation-caused cancer is not fatal, it is not counted in the
IAEA's figures
- If a cancer is initiated by another carcinogen, but accelerated or
promoted by exposure to radiation, it is not counted.
- If an auto-immune disease or any non-cancer is caused by radiation, it
is not counted.
- Radiation-damaged embryos or foetuses which result in miscarriage or
stillbirth do not count
- A congenitally blind, deaf or malformed child whose illnesses are are
radiation-related are not included in the figures because this is not
genetic damage, but rather is teratogenic, and will not be passed on later
to the child's offspring.
- Causing the genetic predisposition to breast cancer or heart disease
does not count since it is not a "serious genetic disease" in the Mendelian
sense.
- Even if radiation causes a fatal cancer or serious genetic disease in a
live born infant, it is discounted if the estimated radiation dose is below
100 mSv [mSv= millsievert, a measurement of radiation exposure. One hundred
millsievert is the equivalent in radiation of about 100 X-Rays].
- Even if radiation causes a lung cancer, it does not count if the person
smokes — in fact whenever there is a possibility of another cause, radiation
cannot be blamed.
- If all else fails, it is possible to claim that radiation below some designated dose does not cause cancer, and then average over the whole body the radiation dose which has actually been received by one part of the body or even organ, as for instance when radio-iodine concentrates in the thyroid. This arbitrary dilution of the dose will ensure that the 100 mSv cut-off point is nowhere near reached. It is a technique used to dismiss the sickness of Gulf War veterans who inhaled small particles of ceramic uranium which stayed in their lungs for more than two years, and in their bodies for more than eight years, irradiating and damaging cells in a particular part of the body.
