Chernobyl death toll will be much higher, Greenpeace says

More than 93,000 people could die as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident – a figure dramatically higher than previous international estimates, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Greenpeace report calls the continuing fallout from Chernobyl a “general crisis.”

And it is blunt in its criticism of an earlier report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that predicted 4,000 deaths from the accident.

“It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious nuclear accident in human history,” Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Ivan Blokov said in a statement.

“Denying the real implications is not only insulting to the thousands of victims but it also leads to dangerous recommendations and the relocation of people in contaminated areas,” he said.

Greenpeace says there is an urgent need to provide more – and better – information to people who are still living in affected areas and still feeling the effects of the disaster.

“It will be the fate of many future generations to suffer the echoes of Chernobyl according to inexorable statistical and biological laws,” the report says.

270,000 will develop cancer, researchers say

The explosion at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, sent a plume of radioactive dust across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

The contamination drifted across Europe and affected the United States and Canada. The accumulation and the impact of the radioactivity released from the catastrophe poisoned land, air and animals.

The Greenpeace report is based on data gathered by the National Academy of Sciences in Belarus.

Researchers there believe that of the 2 billion people affected by Chernobyl disaster worldwide, an estimated 270,000 will develop cancer, and of them, 93,000 will die.

The report also points out that those deaths would be on top of an estimated 200,000 other deaths that have already happened in places such as Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

The report says that in those places, the disaster has already triggered widespread death from medical conditions such as cardiovascular diseases linked to the disaster.

“Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases,” Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters.

© CBC 2006