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If I remember right, the effects of radiation exposure for most residents of Pripyat is much less damaging than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That’s o

If I remember right, the effects of radiation exposure for most residents of Pripyat is much less damaging than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That’s one of the problems with assessing the damage from indirect exposure - things like drinking, smoking, lead exposure, asbestos exposure, etc. are bigger irritants. And control groups are very hard to manage for long term (lifelong) studies.

tyingq 4y ago
I imagine it's hard to say, given the amount of control the USSR had over the press. There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying in Pripyat from radiation exposure: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernobyl-an-excerpt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernob...
- neffy 4y ago
  Exactly - this is one of those things that the former Soviet Union and its successor has worked hard to deny happened, an effort that extends to writing down vague or incorrect causes of death for liquidators. If you read the book Voice of Chernobyl (on which the TV series was based), by about half way through it becomes fairly obvious that a lot of the liquidators must have died of radiation related diseases after their service, just from references to "he was the last one of his group to die" etc. However there is a scientific literature, mostly derived from a single Russian Scientist, V. K. Ivanov and his team, that actively works on denying this. The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.) Generally I would treat claims that there was little contamination, and that contamination didn't spread, with scepticism. There was a lot of looting of the closed off areas. Meanwhile the liquidators themselves are starting to get organised and their estimate is about 200,000 early deaths out of 600,000. Which does line up with the life expectancy chart. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was-really-like-on-top-of-reactor/11223876 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was... The most recent documentary on Chernobyl using Russian archive footage has a few minutes hinting at significant mutations in children at at the time, but it's hard to know what the details are behind that.
  - Emma_Goldman 4y ago
    >"The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.)" Why not? That there was endemic alcoholism is well known and easily explainable. Not only an entire empire collapsed, but an entire lifeworld. Some of the best Russian testaments as to what happened after the end of the Soviet Union, like Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, place great emphasis on it. I mean look at Yeltsin - he was drunk non-stop, and it almost killed him during his presidency.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    Voice of Chernobyl is a propaganda piece. It is full of blatant lies and was instantly rejected by everyone having a slight idea about radiation effects - i read a lot about it in the FidoNet days when it first came out - people ranging from Clinic #6 (radiation) doctors down to 19-year old Army soldiers trained in NBC protection - literally laughed their asses off it. Liquidators actually have longer life expectancy than common folk. Compared to the control group (males of same age starting the same year), more of them are alive today (which is mostly explained by the regular health checkups they all get for free so they are less likely to die from long-neglected chronic diseases Slavic men are very prone to). This is true for 3 liquidator groups out of 4 (that is, to everyone who wasn't on the scene during the first night - of those, and that's a very small group of under 700 people, most suffered radiation sickness or trauma and their life expectancy is of course, shorter). No one of civilians including Pripyat residents, could have suffered any level of radiation damage at all.
    - neffy 4y ago
      The problem with that argument, although I congratulate you for following the state line, is that it requires us to believe that the entire operation wasn't necessary to begin with. If there were no health consequences, then there weren't any reactor rods on the roof, there wasn't any radioactive fallout requiring removal and burial of top soil, no need to shoot all the animals, etc. etc. It also requires us to believe that there was no widespread looting in the area, which is a claim that turns up in multiple sources, and is consistent with Russian behaviour in the current and past wars. It requires us to believe that unlike pretty much every other event in Soviet history, Russia has told the complete honest truth about Chernobyl. On which front, let me just ask - where are the memorials to the victims of Stalin's purges? There has been plenty of time to put a few up since the Soviet Union fell.
trhway 4y ago
>the effects of radiation exposure for most residents of Pripyat Chernobyl didn't have much radiation directly radiated, and the residents of Pripyat were relatively promptly evacuated. The Chernobyl impact has been all about fallout. A bunch of Russian soldiers for example who took over Chernobyl 3 month ago and stayed there for a month until retreat, and who did a lot of digging and armor driving without any PPE in one of the most polluted places there - Red Forest - already got acute radiation sickness as a result and the rest will have a lot of problems down the road from all that fallout dust they ingested. Another example highlighting the fallout - Belarus where the regions most hit by Chernobyl fallout are, ie. Homel and Mogilev, has almost 50% higher cancer rates than Russia and Ukraine (those 2 have pretty close rates between themselves and similar to Belarus patterns of smoking, drinking, nutrition, etc) mostly due to the higher cancer rates in the Homel and Mogilev region. There is also some indications about higher rate of children birth defects and various genetic illnesses there. Those children naturally weren't exposed to Chernobyl's direct radiation, it is its fallout which continues to exist there.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Not saying you’re wrong but how do you know about the Russian soldiers ? Seems like something Russia wouldn’t really talk about ?
  - jacobsievers 4y ago
    It is well documented that they were there, and also true that there is no confirmation that they have suffered any effects as of today. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-45-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-45-iaea...
    - trhway 4y ago
      Of course it would never be confirmed by Russia. The known pieces correlate well though and consistent - the trenches digging and prolonged presence in the Red Forrest by the soldiers is confirmed, and the background radiation there even without disturbing the ground by digging and driving (such disturbance raises level several folds) is 0.1-10mSv/hour, so 30 days continuous presence would result in 0.07-7 Sv. The radiation sickness would start to show at something 0.5 Sv. The reports of Russian soldiers brought into Homel specialized radiation hospital pretty much dove tails it. Personally to me the most important confirmation is that such event is exactly how things happen in Russian army :) And just for desert - the commander of the Russian forces which invaded and were stationed in Chernobyl has as a result of that operation recently received a high military award for "preventing nuclear terrorism". Looks more than ironic given that it is his soldiers who got ill and poisoned and who retreating stole and took with them a lot of various contaminated/activated hardware which were stored in Chernobyl zone for years.
Spooky23 4y ago
People advocating for one position over another are always splitting hairs to tell whatever tale they seek to tell. Usually the people who like to minimize the impact of things like this are talking about direct radiation exposure vs exposure to fallout materials or things contaminated by fallout. People seeking to maximize the scare factor will yak about materials found in Vermont milk, etc. Its obnoxious pedantry.

tyingq 4y ago

I imagine it's hard to say, given the amount of control the USSR had over the press. There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying in Pripyat from radiation exposure: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernobyl-an-excerpt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernob...

neffy 4y ago
Exactly - this is one of those things that the former Soviet Union and its successor has worked hard to deny happened, an effort that extends to writing down vague or incorrect causes of death for liquidators. If you read the book Voice of Chernobyl (on which the TV series was based), by about half way through it becomes fairly obvious that a lot of the liquidators must have died of radiation related diseases after their service, just from references to "he was the last one of his group to die" etc. However there is a scientific literature, mostly derived from a single Russian Scientist, V. K. Ivanov and his team, that actively works on denying this. The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.) Generally I would treat claims that there was little contamination, and that contamination didn't spread, with scepticism. There was a lot of looting of the closed off areas. Meanwhile the liquidators themselves are starting to get organised and their estimate is about 200,000 early deaths out of 600,000. Which does line up with the life expectancy chart. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was-really-like-on-top-of-reactor/11223876 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was... The most recent documentary on Chernobyl using Russian archive footage has a few minutes hinting at significant mutations in children at at the time, but it's hard to know what the details are behind that.
- Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  >"The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.)" Why not? That there was endemic alcoholism is well known and easily explainable. Not only an entire empire collapsed, but an entire lifeworld. Some of the best Russian testaments as to what happened after the end of the Soviet Union, like Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, place great emphasis on it. I mean look at Yeltsin - he was drunk non-stop, and it almost killed him during his presidency.
- anovikov 4y ago
  Voice of Chernobyl is a propaganda piece. It is full of blatant lies and was instantly rejected by everyone having a slight idea about radiation effects - i read a lot about it in the FidoNet days when it first came out - people ranging from Clinic #6 (radiation) doctors down to 19-year old Army soldiers trained in NBC protection - literally laughed their asses off it. Liquidators actually have longer life expectancy than common folk. Compared to the control group (males of same age starting the same year), more of them are alive today (which is mostly explained by the regular health checkups they all get for free so they are less likely to die from long-neglected chronic diseases Slavic men are very prone to). This is true for 3 liquidator groups out of 4 (that is, to everyone who wasn't on the scene during the first night - of those, and that's a very small group of under 700 people, most suffered radiation sickness or trauma and their life expectancy is of course, shorter). No one of civilians including Pripyat residents, could have suffered any level of radiation damage at all.
  - neffy 4y ago
    The problem with that argument, although I congratulate you for following the state line, is that it requires us to believe that the entire operation wasn't necessary to begin with. If there were no health consequences, then there weren't any reactor rods on the roof, there wasn't any radioactive fallout requiring removal and burial of top soil, no need to shoot all the animals, etc. etc. It also requires us to believe that there was no widespread looting in the area, which is a claim that turns up in multiple sources, and is consistent with Russian behaviour in the current and past wars. It requires us to believe that unlike pretty much every other event in Soviet history, Russia has told the complete honest truth about Chernobyl. On which front, let me just ask - where are the memorials to the victims of Stalin's purges? There has been plenty of time to put a few up since the Soviet Union fell.

trhway 4y ago

>the effects of radiation exposure for most residents of Pripyat Chernobyl didn't have much radiation directly radiated, and the residents of Pripyat were relatively promptly evacuated. The Chernobyl impact has been all about fallout. A bunch of Russian soldiers for example who took over Chernobyl 3 month ago and stayed there for a month until retreat, and who did a lot of digging and armor driving without any PPE in one of the most polluted places there - Red Forest - already got acute radiation sickness as a result and the rest will have a lot of problems down the road from all that fallout dust they ingested. Another example highlighting the fallout - Belarus where the regions most hit by Chernobyl fallout are, ie. Homel and Mogilev, has almost 50% higher cancer rates than Russia and Ukraine (those 2 have pretty close rates between themselves and similar to Belarus patterns of smoking, drinking, nutrition, etc) mostly due to the higher cancer rates in the Homel and Mogilev region. There is also some indications about higher rate of children birth defects and various genetic illnesses there. Those children naturally weren't exposed to Chernobyl's direct radiation, it is its fallout which continues to exist there.

bamboozled 4y ago
Not saying you’re wrong but how do you know about the Russian soldiers ? Seems like something Russia wouldn’t really talk about ?
- jacobsievers 4y ago
  It is well documented that they were there, and also true that there is no confirmation that they have suffered any effects as of today. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-45-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-45-iaea...
  - trhway 4y ago
    Of course it would never be confirmed by Russia. The known pieces correlate well though and consistent - the trenches digging and prolonged presence in the Red Forrest by the soldiers is confirmed, and the background radiation there even without disturbing the ground by digging and driving (such disturbance raises level several folds) is 0.1-10mSv/hour, so 30 days continuous presence would result in 0.07-7 Sv. The radiation sickness would start to show at something 0.5 Sv. The reports of Russian soldiers brought into Homel specialized radiation hospital pretty much dove tails it. Personally to me the most important confirmation is that such event is exactly how things happen in Russian army :) And just for desert - the commander of the Russian forces which invaded and were stationed in Chernobyl has as a result of that operation recently received a high military award for "preventing nuclear terrorism". Looks more than ironic given that it is his soldiers who got ill and poisoned and who retreating stole and took with them a lot of various contaminated/activated hardware which were stored in Chernobyl zone for years.

Spooky23 4y ago

People advocating for one position over another are always splitting hairs to tell whatever tale they seek to tell. Usually the people who like to minimize the impact of things like this are talking about direct radiation exposure vs exposure to fallout materials or things contaminated by fallout. People seeking to maximize the scare factor will yak about materials found in Vermont milk, etc. Its obnoxious pedantry.