The number of victims in Chernobyl-type nuclear disasters is greatly exaggerated for drama.
Article by Michael Schellenberger - a famous author and columnist writing about energy and the environment. Written after watching the first episode of the series.
Judging by the show "Chernobyl" from HBO, it is very difficult to make an interesting movie about a nuclear catastrophe without forcing the audience to believe in exaggerated consequences.
Over the past ten years, more and more celebrities, among whom were Sting and Robert Downey Jr. , publicly announced support for nuclear energy. Then last May, CBS released the episode of the series Madame Secretary. In it, the oil tycoon tried to prevent the advancement of nuclear energy, and two characters expressed dissatisfaction with the widespread disinformation about the relative safety of this technology.
As a result, I began to believe that Hollywood’s hostility towards nuclear energy was declining - so I just caught my breath when I learned that HBO is releasing a large-budget television film dedicated to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
')
In the course of my research, I was faced with the fact that the entertainment industry is the main reason for the spread of popular fears of nuclear energy. Films such as Chinese Syndrome (1979), Cloud (2006) and Pandora (2016) are devoted to stopping the construction of nuclear power plants and call for the burning of fossil fuels instead.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by the tweet of the director and author of the “Chernobyl” script Craig Mazin on April 8: “The lesson of Chernobyl is not that modern nuclear energy is dangerous. The lesson is that lies, arrogance and repression of criticism are dangerous. ”
Later Mazin told the journalist: “I am for nuclear energy, I think that nuclear energy is a necessary element in the fight against global warming.” Then he agreed with the tweet that "Chernobyl" can not happen in the United States.
Mazin insisted that his TV movie would stick to the facts. “I am inclined to a less dramatic version of events,” said Mazin, adding : “you shouldn’t slip into sensationalism.”
Therefore, when I sat down to watch "Chernobyl", my fear gave way to hope. Can it happen that Hollywood finally presents the most terrible nuclear catastrophe honestly and precisely?
In the first episode of "Chernobyl" the nuclear reactor explodes, tears off the roof of the building and lights up. Station workers vomits, their faces turn red, some appear to be dying.
We see how an employee of the station, at the age of twenty and something, holds the door to the reactor hall open, and he begins to bleed from different parts of the body. He saves his companion with a red face covered with blood and blisters, and seems to be leaving him to die in the hallway. Later we see how this man falls, and, apparently, smokes his last cigarette.
Later, the station manager, who denied the severity of the incident, became very sick when he learned about the real scale of the tragedy. When he is taken to the hospital, we see a fireman carrying a body on a stretcher, falls and drops it.
It seemed that dozens of employees and firefighters immediately died, but according to an official UN report (p. 66) about the incident, only two workers died in the first few hours after the explosion - not tens and not hundreds. And both of them did not die from radiation. One was killed by the debris of an explosion, and the other was killed by burns (from fire).
Two weeks later, the firefighters and people who arrived at the scene first began to die. The main cause of death, apparently, became burns. Two thirds of the dead rescuers, in addition to high levels of radiation, also received serious burns (from fire).
“In five cases, skin damage from fire and radiation was the only cause of death,” concludes the UN report (p. 624). Moreover, "six patients who did not receive critical skin burns survived."
“Burn victims often die from infections,” Dr. Geraldine Thomas, a molecular pathology professor at Imperial College in London and an expert on Chernobyl, explained to me. - The skin is our best barrier for killer germs. By damaging this barrier, we greatly facilitate the task of pathogenic microbes entering the body. ”
If the body of the person who opened the door to the reactor hall were really bleeding, the blood would flow because of thermal burns, or because of the high temperature of the door, and not because of radiation. I don’t know if Mazin and HBO wanted to create the impression that all the symptoms shown were due to radiation rather than fire, or that many more workers and firefighters died on the spot than they actually were - but it was precisely that impression that remained with me.
Whatever their intentions, our tendency to attribute radiation to the damage of Chernobyl, rather than fire, is typical of a common attitude towards nuclear disasters. The total number of Chernobyl victims is relatively small compared to other famous catastrophes. According to a UN report, 31 deaths are directly linked to this incident. Three people died at the scene, and 28 - a few weeks later. Since then, 19 more have died for “various reasons,” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and injuries. The UN concluded that "the involvement of radiation in deaths has become less obvious."
Accidental death is always a tragedy, but you should look at the situation in perspective. The most terrible disaster associated with energy was the collapse of the Banqiao dam at a hydroelectric power plant in China, which killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people [26,000 directly sank, but subsequently several hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation and epidemics. trans.]. In the Bhopal catastrophe , 15,000 people died in an accident at a chemical plant [according to other sources - 18,000, of which 3,000 on the day of the disaster, and 15,000 afterwards / approx. trans.].
Even other fires are much worse. The fire in the Grenfell Tower building in London in 2017 killed 71 people. During the fire of the twin towers in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, 343 firefighters were killed.
What about cancer? Among people who were less than 18 years old during a catastrophe, 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been documented , and a recent UN report from 2017 concludes that only 25% of cases, that is, 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (paragraphs A - C in the results). In earlier works, the UN estimated that 16,000 cases could be attributed to Chernobyl radiation.
Since the percentage of mortality in thyroid cancer is only 1%, the number of deaths from it caused by Chernobyl can be estimated at 50-160, and most of them affect the elderly. That's all. There is no reliable evidence that radiation in Chernobyl led to an increase in any other diseases or disorders, including birth defects.
People have a natural tendency to find someone guilty when a catastrophe sets in. Many parents of autistic children blame the vaccines for this, which were made shortly before the discovery of autism. The same applies to parents of children born with congenital defects after the Chernobyl disaster. However, a 2017 review by Oxford University did not find “conclusive evidence of an increased risk of birth defects due to radiation in contaminated areas”. And in a study that claimed an increase in the number of birth defects, “there was not enough data about third-party risk factors, for example, the mother’s diet and alcohol consumption,” said Oxford researchers. Even the lead author of the work, which claims to increase the number of birth defects due to Chernobyl radiation, admitted later : "With this research we could not prove that radiation leads to birth defects."
Chernobyl radiation may have caused more harm than was measured, but if so, it was not enough to stand out against all the other harmful things. “In the USSR, radical social changes were taking place that affected the landscape of diseases,” Dr. Thomas told me, “and this is a very significant factor.”
The main factors were anxiety and stress. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls the "psychosocial impact" of Chernobyl "the main factor affecting health."
“People exposed to Chernobyl had anxiety levels twice as high as the rest,” the WHO report said, “and they were more likely to report many unexplainable physical symptoms and a subjective feeling of poor health.”
Part of the blame can be placed on local doctors. “To some extent, these symptoms were a consequence of the belief that the catastrophe affected their health,” wrote WHO scientists, “and the fact that they were diagnosed by a doctor with“ health problems associated with Chernobyl ”.”
And also, I believe, the fault lies with the entertainment industry. For decades, she exaggerated the significance of nuclear catastrophes and fed the public with fears, anxiety, and stress related to radiation. Mazin says he seriously approached the need to adhere to the fact, but as the story unfolded in the episode, my anxiety grew.
The wife of one of the main characters, a fireman, is pregnant, like other women. We see several sinister scenes where parents walk with their children in wheelchairs. It is hard to believe that HBO placed all these pregnant women in the frame in the first act, and will not show the wide distribution of birth defects, along with a causal link, in the third.
If mortality is so low, why does Chernobyl continue to attract and frighten us, as well as receive tens of millions from HBO?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that nuclear disasters remind us of nuclear bombs and our vulnerability to them. At the beginning of the series, one station worker asks another: “Is this a war? Are we being bombed? ” The conversation later repeated by others. The station manager and the CPSU bureaucrats are found in a special room that can "withstand the nuclear attack of the Americans."
In this, and in some other aspects, Chernobyl seems familiar. A reviewer from The New York Times called it "an old-fashioned and ordinary, albeit longer, disaster film." And that worries me.
“The largest and most artificial invention is the creation of a fictional character, Belarusian female scientist, played by Emily Watson,” writes Times. The Times critic blames "Chernobyl" for "a penchant for Hollywood exaggeration - to show us what was not," and for "rolling into fiction and melodrama."
However, this TV movie is not necessarily the end of the story. HBO and Mazin have created a podcast and a video about shooting the film. There, or somewhere else, Mazin and HBO can reveal to the audience the scientific consensus that the fear of radiation from nuclear disasters causes far more harm than the radiation itself.
And this does not take into account the role that this fear has played in preventing the spread of nuclear energy, which has saved almost two million lives to date, simply because we did not need to burn fossil fuels and could save even more.
They may somehow reflect the fact that I discovered during the research for this article: a young man named Alexander Yuvchenko, who opened the door, lost a lot of blood, and somehow survived, remains a supporter of nuclear energy. “I treat this normally,” Yuvchenko told a journalist in 2004. “If safety remains the top priority at all stages of plant planning and maintenance, then everything should be in order” [Yuvchenko died at the age of 47 in 2008 / approx. trans.].
After reading my tweets, where I compared the number of victims of Chernobyl (about 200) with more common causes of death , for example, walking (270 000 per year), driving a car (1 350 000 per year) and work (2 300 000 per year) , several people who claimed that they came from those places accused me of being insensitive to the suffering of the people to whom they had been evacuated.
But the real insensitivity will either exaggerate or force the public to believe in exaggerating the number of victims of Chernobyl and the power of radiation, as this leads to panic, as, for example, happened in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, where about 2000 people died. Certain evacuation volumes could be justified, but there was no reason for such a large and long-term movement of people.
“Looking back, we can say that this evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a risk management professor who led a recent project that investigated incidents involving nuclear energy. “We would not recommend any evacuation.”
As a result, from “Chernobyl” from HBO, regardless of the producers' intentions, it is clear that it is difficult to make an exciting movie about a nuclear catastrophe, without exaggerating its real consequences for the audience. And if you put aside the antinuclear ideology, the entertainment industry has to invent all kinds of fiction about nuclear disasters simply because so few people die in them.
Judging by the show "Chernobyl" from HBO, it is very difficult to make an interesting movie about a nuclear catastrophe without forcing the audience to believe in exaggerated consequences.
Over the past ten years, more and more celebrities, among whom were Sting and Robert Downey Jr. , publicly announced support for nuclear energy. Then last May, CBS released the episode of the series Madame Secretary. In it, the oil tycoon tried to prevent the advancement of nuclear energy, and two characters expressed dissatisfaction with the widespread disinformation about the relative safety of this technology.
As a result, I began to believe that Hollywood’s hostility towards nuclear energy was declining - so I just caught my breath when I learned that HBO is releasing a large-budget television film dedicated to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
')
In the course of my research, I was faced with the fact that the entertainment industry is the main reason for the spread of popular fears of nuclear energy. Films such as Chinese Syndrome (1979), Cloud (2006) and Pandora (2016) are devoted to stopping the construction of nuclear power plants and call for the burning of fossil fuels instead.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by the tweet of the director and author of the “Chernobyl” script Craig Mazin on April 8: “The lesson of Chernobyl is not that modern nuclear energy is dangerous. The lesson is that lies, arrogance and repression of criticism are dangerous. ”
Later Mazin told the journalist: “I am for nuclear energy, I think that nuclear energy is a necessary element in the fight against global warming.” Then he agreed with the tweet that "Chernobyl" can not happen in the United States.
Mazin insisted that his TV movie would stick to the facts. “I am inclined to a less dramatic version of events,” said Mazin, adding : “you shouldn’t slip into sensationalism.”
Therefore, when I sat down to watch "Chernobyl", my fear gave way to hope. Can it happen that Hollywood finally presents the most terrible nuclear catastrophe honestly and precisely?
Chernobyl and Chernobyl
In the first episode of "Chernobyl" the nuclear reactor explodes, tears off the roof of the building and lights up. Station workers vomits, their faces turn red, some appear to be dying.
We see how an employee of the station, at the age of twenty and something, holds the door to the reactor hall open, and he begins to bleed from different parts of the body. He saves his companion with a red face covered with blood and blisters, and seems to be leaving him to die in the hallway. Later we see how this man falls, and, apparently, smokes his last cigarette.
Later, the station manager, who denied the severity of the incident, became very sick when he learned about the real scale of the tragedy. When he is taken to the hospital, we see a fireman carrying a body on a stretcher, falls and drops it.
It seemed that dozens of employees and firefighters immediately died, but according to an official UN report (p. 66) about the incident, only two workers died in the first few hours after the explosion - not tens and not hundreds. And both of them did not die from radiation. One was killed by the debris of an explosion, and the other was killed by burns (from fire).
Two weeks later, the firefighters and people who arrived at the scene first began to die. The main cause of death, apparently, became burns. Two thirds of the dead rescuers, in addition to high levels of radiation, also received serious burns (from fire).
“In five cases, skin damage from fire and radiation was the only cause of death,” concludes the UN report (p. 624). Moreover, "six patients who did not receive critical skin burns survived."
“Burn victims often die from infections,” Dr. Geraldine Thomas, a molecular pathology professor at Imperial College in London and an expert on Chernobyl, explained to me. - The skin is our best barrier for killer germs. By damaging this barrier, we greatly facilitate the task of pathogenic microbes entering the body. ”
If the body of the person who opened the door to the reactor hall were really bleeding, the blood would flow because of thermal burns, or because of the high temperature of the door, and not because of radiation. I don’t know if Mazin and HBO wanted to create the impression that all the symptoms shown were due to radiation rather than fire, or that many more workers and firefighters died on the spot than they actually were - but it was precisely that impression that remained with me.
Charges to the wrong address
Whatever their intentions, our tendency to attribute radiation to the damage of Chernobyl, rather than fire, is typical of a common attitude towards nuclear disasters. The total number of Chernobyl victims is relatively small compared to other famous catastrophes. According to a UN report, 31 deaths are directly linked to this incident. Three people died at the scene, and 28 - a few weeks later. Since then, 19 more have died for “various reasons,” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and injuries. The UN concluded that "the involvement of radiation in deaths has become less obvious."
Accidental death is always a tragedy, but you should look at the situation in perspective. The most terrible disaster associated with energy was the collapse of the Banqiao dam at a hydroelectric power plant in China, which killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people [26,000 directly sank, but subsequently several hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation and epidemics. trans.]. In the Bhopal catastrophe , 15,000 people died in an accident at a chemical plant [according to other sources - 18,000, of which 3,000 on the day of the disaster, and 15,000 afterwards / approx. trans.].
Even other fires are much worse. The fire in the Grenfell Tower building in London in 2017 killed 71 people. During the fire of the twin towers in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, 343 firefighters were killed.
What about cancer? Among people who were less than 18 years old during a catastrophe, 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been documented , and a recent UN report from 2017 concludes that only 25% of cases, that is, 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (paragraphs A - C in the results). In earlier works, the UN estimated that 16,000 cases could be attributed to Chernobyl radiation.
Since the percentage of mortality in thyroid cancer is only 1%, the number of deaths from it caused by Chernobyl can be estimated at 50-160, and most of them affect the elderly. That's all. There is no reliable evidence that radiation in Chernobyl led to an increase in any other diseases or disorders, including birth defects.
People have a natural tendency to find someone guilty when a catastrophe sets in. Many parents of autistic children blame the vaccines for this, which were made shortly before the discovery of autism. The same applies to parents of children born with congenital defects after the Chernobyl disaster. However, a 2017 review by Oxford University did not find “conclusive evidence of an increased risk of birth defects due to radiation in contaminated areas”. And in a study that claimed an increase in the number of birth defects, “there was not enough data about third-party risk factors, for example, the mother’s diet and alcohol consumption,” said Oxford researchers. Even the lead author of the work, which claims to increase the number of birth defects due to Chernobyl radiation, admitted later : "With this research we could not prove that radiation leads to birth defects."
Chernobyl radiation may have caused more harm than was measured, but if so, it was not enough to stand out against all the other harmful things. “In the USSR, radical social changes were taking place that affected the landscape of diseases,” Dr. Thomas told me, “and this is a very significant factor.”
The main factors were anxiety and stress. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls the "psychosocial impact" of Chernobyl "the main factor affecting health."
“People exposed to Chernobyl had anxiety levels twice as high as the rest,” the WHO report said, “and they were more likely to report many unexplainable physical symptoms and a subjective feeling of poor health.”
Part of the blame can be placed on local doctors. “To some extent, these symptoms were a consequence of the belief that the catastrophe affected their health,” wrote WHO scientists, “and the fact that they were diagnosed by a doctor with“ health problems associated with Chernobyl ”.”
And also, I believe, the fault lies with the entertainment industry. For decades, she exaggerated the significance of nuclear catastrophes and fed the public with fears, anxiety, and stress related to radiation. Mazin says he seriously approached the need to adhere to the fact, but as the story unfolded in the episode, my anxiety grew.
The wife of one of the main characters, a fireman, is pregnant, like other women. We see several sinister scenes where parents walk with their children in wheelchairs. It is hard to believe that HBO placed all these pregnant women in the frame in the first act, and will not show the wide distribution of birth defects, along with a causal link, in the third.
Why are we so afraid of this?
If mortality is so low, why does Chernobyl continue to attract and frighten us, as well as receive tens of millions from HBO?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that nuclear disasters remind us of nuclear bombs and our vulnerability to them. At the beginning of the series, one station worker asks another: “Is this a war? Are we being bombed? ” The conversation later repeated by others. The station manager and the CPSU bureaucrats are found in a special room that can "withstand the nuclear attack of the Americans."
In this, and in some other aspects, Chernobyl seems familiar. A reviewer from The New York Times called it "an old-fashioned and ordinary, albeit longer, disaster film." And that worries me.
“The largest and most artificial invention is the creation of a fictional character, Belarusian female scientist, played by Emily Watson,” writes Times. The Times critic blames "Chernobyl" for "a penchant for Hollywood exaggeration - to show us what was not," and for "rolling into fiction and melodrama."
However, this TV movie is not necessarily the end of the story. HBO and Mazin have created a podcast and a video about shooting the film. There, or somewhere else, Mazin and HBO can reveal to the audience the scientific consensus that the fear of radiation from nuclear disasters causes far more harm than the radiation itself.
And this does not take into account the role that this fear has played in preventing the spread of nuclear energy, which has saved almost two million lives to date, simply because we did not need to burn fossil fuels and could save even more.
They may somehow reflect the fact that I discovered during the research for this article: a young man named Alexander Yuvchenko, who opened the door, lost a lot of blood, and somehow survived, remains a supporter of nuclear energy. “I treat this normally,” Yuvchenko told a journalist in 2004. “If safety remains the top priority at all stages of plant planning and maintenance, then everything should be in order” [Yuvchenko died at the age of 47 in 2008 / approx. trans.].
After reading my tweets, where I compared the number of victims of Chernobyl (about 200) with more common causes of death , for example, walking (270 000 per year), driving a car (1 350 000 per year) and work (2 300 000 per year) , several people who claimed that they came from those places accused me of being insensitive to the suffering of the people to whom they had been evacuated.
But the real insensitivity will either exaggerate or force the public to believe in exaggerating the number of victims of Chernobyl and the power of radiation, as this leads to panic, as, for example, happened in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, where about 2000 people died. Certain evacuation volumes could be justified, but there was no reason for such a large and long-term movement of people.
“Looking back, we can say that this evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a risk management professor who led a recent project that investigated incidents involving nuclear energy. “We would not recommend any evacuation.”
As a result, from “Chernobyl” from HBO, regardless of the producers' intentions, it is clear that it is difficult to make an exciting movie about a nuclear catastrophe, without exaggerating its real consequences for the audience. And if you put aside the antinuclear ideology, the entertainment industry has to invent all kinds of fiction about nuclear disasters simply because so few people die in them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/457400/
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