Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million PeopleAlternet: Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences...
The book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, was compiled by Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus...
The authors said, 'For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki... No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe... Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere.'...
Drawing upon extensive data, the authors estimate the number of deaths worldwide due to Chernobyl fallout from 1986 through 2004 was 985,000, a number that has since increased...
Fallout reached the United States and Canada nine days after the disaster... Fallout entered the US environment and food chain through rainfall. Levels of iodine-131 in milk, for example, were seven to 28 times above normal in May and June 1986. The authors found that the highest US radiation levels were recorded in the Pacific Northwest... Four years later, 25 percent of imported food was found to be still contaminated...
In the early 1990s, a few years after the meltdown, thyroid cancer in Connecticut children had nearly doubled. This occurred at the same time that childhood thyroid cancer rates in the former Soviet Union were surging, as the thyroid gland is highly sensitive to radioactive iodine exposures.
The world now has 435 nuclear reactors and of these, 104 are in the United States.
