The Legacy of Chernobyl

Author:Zhores Medvedev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

There were hundreds of dead birds and most of the animals were blind. Most pets, particularly dogs, were later killed by special teams of soldiers. Dogs and cats have the same radiosensitivity as humans. Their state indicated an accumulated dose of between 700 and 1,000 rem (extended to five weeks).

According to the Soviet Report to the IAEA, a 2 per cent increase of the natural incidence of cancer is predicted among those who will be monitored permanently. Under normal circumstances about 14,000 of the evacuees could expect to die of cancer within 70 years. A 2 per cent increase means that there will be 280 new cases of cancer-related mortality.113 If one added to the evacuees about 500,000 people engaged in decontamination, repair work, road block inspections, servicemen and policemen who were exposed to the emergency level of radiation exposure, the number of estimated cancer-related deaths would rise to 1,700. About one million people now live in the special regime zone, where the permissible level of accumulated exposure has been raised to 35 rem.114 In 1988 their average dose was already 9 rem per person. This will increase the figure of cancer-related deaths for the most exposed population to 2,500. But radiation damage is not a very selective mutagen or carcinogen and carcinogenesis causes only about a third of the cases of radiation-related reduction of life span. I estimate that this means that the total future mortality figure related to Chernobyl amongst the most exposed part of the population could reach from 5,000 to 7,000. Only one in a hundred of future deaths in this group will be directly due to Chernobyl, but the ratio will be different for different age groups (higher for those who were younger when the accident occurred). The incidence of cancer among the younger groups will be statistically measurable. There is likely to be a particularly marked increase in the incidence of cancer of the thyroid and leukaemia. But the life expectancy of the entire group has been reduced by at least one or two years.

For people who live in the part of the Soviet Union that was most affected by the Chernobyl fallout, the figures given in the original Soviet report do not seem to me to be an overestimation. The actual contamination of the environment and food is not known, but the approximate estimate of the radioiodine contamination of milk, meat and other products given for 15 regions with a population of 75 million could also be an indicator of radiocaesium.115 Market sales of milk and meat were forbidden in many regions, but it was impossible to prevent some radioiodine in the milk sold in shops. Standards were introduced for the ‘permissible’ level for milk that was to be sold. Milk which exceeded that level was normally processed into butter or cheese:

The standards were designed to ensure that thyroid gland exposure of children (the critical organ for iodine-131) did not exceed 30 rem. This condition was observed by establishing the permissible content of iodine-131 in milk at 1.

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