The 1986 nuclear power station disaster in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is widely credited with boosting the somewhat nascent green movement in its opposition to atomic energy. The Chernobyl accident, which contaminated nearly 1,000 square miles of the surrounding land, made the UK’s nuclear power programme a much harder sell to an increasingly sceptical media, driven wild by green claims, which it dutifully transmitted to the public. And even in France, a champion of the technology, development of new reactors slowed. But the real lesson of Chernobyl has long been avoided in favour of false debates about risk – a fickle concept, that can be easily misled by ideology.
In the decades since, debate has raged about the final death count caused by one of history’s most notorious industrial accidents. Researchers aligned to anti-nuclear campaign claim that as many as 60,000 deaths were caused across Europe. But according to a 2008 UN agency analysis, just 30 people were killed by exposure to high levels of radiation during the immediate aftermath. (For a sober review of the contested figures, see this decent summary.) Arrival at an accurate figure is confounded by the passions summoned by debates about nuclear energy, not unlike the climate debate, which has thrown up extremely ideologically-prone statistical methodology used to estimate mortality and risk, which are routinely confused for scientific fact.
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