Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
[ 17 ]
“
Five years ago I visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and the Belarus border where
much of the radioactive plume from Chernobyl descended on 26 April 1986. I challenge chief scientist
John Beddington and environmentalists like George Monbiot or any of the pundits now downplaying
the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, the scientists, the mothers, children and villagers who
have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident.
It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We
found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; ad-
olescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; fetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who
told us every member of their family was sick.
This was 20 years after the accident, but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone
cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed
and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said
they still saw cesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to
be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that 'the Chernobyl
necklace'—thyroid cancer—was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of acceler-
ated ageing….
At the end of 2006, Yablokov [member of the Russian academy of sciences, and adviser to President
Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl] and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and
increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devast-
ated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organization and the
industry. . . .
Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happen-
ing within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be
panic in every major city in Britain. We still don't know the final outcome, but to hear experts claiming
that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is
nothing short of disgraceful.
”
—John Vidal, “Nuclear's Green Cheerleaders Forget Chernobyl at Our
Peril,”
Guardian.co.uk
, April 1, 2011
