[posnet]

> official nuclear death are low - but there is a lot of dispute on the "long tail" of long term deaths from the big nuclear disasters of Ukraine and Japan

Fukushima happened too soon, and it will be a long time before the results of that disaster on the healthy of the surrounding people can be properly analysed.

Chernobyl on the other hand has been studied extensively and considering the scale of the disaster the toll on human life, including increase in cancer rates is lower than expected at the time of the accident.

In particular the Chernobyl Forum's 2005 report found that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer in children had caused 5000 additional cases due to the release of radioactive iodine from Chernobyl.

These are seen as the only additional deaths due to radiation exposure other than the estimated 2000 caused due to directed exposure to clean up workers at the site itself.

You can find an summary of the finding on the World Health organisations website, as well as read the report directly.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/chernobyl.pdf

[BurningFrog]

Those are very high numbers.

> estimated 2000 caused due to directed exposure to clean up workers at the site itself

The more common numbers you see are under 50.

This Slate article goes over the uncertainty: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...

[bigbugbag]

>The more common numbers you see are under 50.

This is a very high number.

The official Soviet total death toll was 2 until risen to 31 in 1986 and repeated.

The point is you'll find all kind of number ranging from 2 to a million death due to chernobyl and number of death is not even a valid metric to measure the human impact of the chernobyl "accident". One of my family member is a farmer living a few thousand kilometer away from Chernobyl, he was working outside on the days where the contaminated cloud didn't reach him according to the government, but still he developed a chronic red blood cell sickness shortly after.

Then again death count of past nuclear accident is a terrible way to assess the impact of nuclear energy, it is a good way to show that humans are bad at dealing with nuclear plants and that nuclear plant are run with not enough regard for security and regulation, not decommissioning due and overdue plants because money and greatly underestimating such costs.

[throwawayaway]

If you look at the work that these guys had to do, particularly on the roof and under the reactor to prevent the core from leaking out, then the number 50 is hard to believe.

These two wikipedia pages are worth reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidator_(Chernobyl)

You can see videos of the work that they had to do.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bio+robot+chern...

Also the linear no threshold model is quite questionable when you consider how dosages are measured in an emergency situation, and that different isotopes attack different parts of the body in non uniform fashion. i.e. Skin contact versus ingestion or inhalation.