[acidburnNSA]

It's really surprising that this and the Banqiao dam failure that killed 230,000 are fairly unknown to the west while Chernobyl is a household name, which killed ~60 first responders and "up to 4000" from early cancer deaths (using conservative linear no threshold models of dose response)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

[_zamorano_]

It´s not.

The USSR was responsible for Chernobyl disaster and with the cold war still running, it was a candy for the western media.

In case of the Bhopal disaster, an american owned company was to blame and happened in a non threathening third world country. No news for western media.

[andreskytt]

The case is well documented in relevant literature. For example, the System Safety books by Nancy Leveson

[ckastner]

I also bring up that example quite frequently.

I believe that is because conceptually, radiation is such a foreign concept to people. Who can blame them, they only hear it in the context of danger (for example, when getting an x-ray) or catastrophe (Chernobyl). But they'll happily eat a banana.

[adrianN]

The difference is that a dam disaster is fairly localized in both time and space and the damage is visible. When your feet are dry you're safe. With radiation, the area is poisoned for generations and the danger is invisible. You don't know whether eating that mushroom will lead to a birth defect in your next child.

[acidburnNSA]

That's probably part of it. Radiation is certainly a bit harder to detect with our human senses. Maybe if we put radiation detectors in every home and printed out XKCD dose effect charts people could make more risk-informed (as opposed to fear/uncertainty-informed) decisions.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Keep in mind that normal fossil fueled power plants are killing about 4.2 million people per year via air pollution, which is also largely invisible. I don't quite understand why radiation killing up to 4000 freaks people out so much more vs. air pollution killing 4.2 million/year.

https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

[shalmanese]

Similarly, we have paid much more attention to the ~10s of deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster but somehow conveniently ignore the ~20,000 deaths from the tsunami that caused the disaster.

[ozmaverick72]

According to the HBO series on Chernobyl the Russians deliberately kept no statistics on radiation related illness and deaths related to the accident. They said estimates ranged from the number you quoted to upwards of 90 000 deaths. Thanks for telling us about the Banqiao dam failure I will read more about it.

[acidburnNSA]

HBO is not a great reference in this case. The teams of experts from the UN and WHO said "up to 4000" using conservative models after decades of study. One small Ukrainian team said 90,000, and that's the number HBO and Greenpeace use. Actually HBO said: "Between 4,000 and 90,000", which really pissed me off. The scientific consensus number is up to 4000.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

The crazy thing is that even if it was 90,000, nuclear wouldn't change much in how safe it is relative to other energy sources. Again, Banqiao dam killed 230,000 and fossil kills 4,200,000 every single year from air pollution.

[ozmaverick72]

It's pretty hard to have scientific consensus when you don't have any reliable information to base it on.

[acidburnNSA]

It's certainly softer science than 1900s physics. There are a few big science-related questions that require practical approaches to that aren't 100% black and white. So consensus has to allow for a few more outlier positions than usual.

Interestingly, climate change and Chernobyl health effects have a lot of parallels. They've both been broadly studied by various teams of scientists. Society has turned to using large internationally-respected UN and WHO-organized group of experts to deal with the these kinds of questions. For Chernobyl, this group is called UNSCEAR [1]. For climate change it's called the IPCC [2].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html [2] https://www.ipcc.ch/

In both Chernobyl and Climate change, there are people who passionately disagree with the international UN teams of scientists. In climate change, we call them climate-change deniers. In Chernobyl, we call them Greenpeace. In the name of the scientific method, it's worth listening to what these people have to say and testing some hypotheses. If the hypotheses turn out to be hard to support, we begin to move on with a mainstream consensus.

The odd thing is that these groups of people (climate change deniers and Greenpeace) have very little else in common.

[ncmncm]

The same happened after the Three Mile Island meltdown.

Huge amounts of radioactive krypton gas were "vented", and, being much heavier than air, it all ran downhill and pooled invisibly at the nearest dam where, conveniently, only poor people lived. No effort was expended to warn or evacuate them, or to catalog the deadly maladies they suffered in their thousands afterward.

To this day it is easy to find people insisting in all earnestness that TMI didn't kill anybody. They are never interested in discussing the gassing of the downstream population.

[acidburnNSA]

That's highly outside the norm of scientific understanding on TMI. Please provide a citation suggesting the dose and dose rate that you think those downwinders received. I can help compare dose rates to expected biological damage and we can look into the likelihood of anyone being injured by it.

Here's a 1984 study saying the dose from Krypton (vented years after the accident) was insignificant compared to the initial accident [1]. Where are you getting your info?

[1] https://tmi2kml.inl.gov/Documents/2d-Other/(1984-08-15)%20TM...

Regarding no one being warned... again, where are you getting this info? It looks like they were warned by the Washington Post [2].

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/05/15/s...

[ncmncm]

"Downwind" assumes dispersal by turbulent airflow over a large area.

But krypton gas is 3x as dense as air. Xenon is 5x. They don't mix eagerly with air, but run downhill more like a (fluffy) liquid. Riding above the water, they run freely over low obstacles to water flow, and spread out far beyond the water's edge. These gases would have run down the Susquehanna River and spread out in the bottom lands along it.

The paper cited in [1] is extremely guarded in its estimates of exposure to Kr radioisotopes, particularly concerning the more active ones like Kr87, 88, and 79. They note that helicopter sampling would produce unreliable measures, and the first measurements of any kind did not occur until 2 days after the incident, when the most active would have largely decayed, and (anyway) run downstream.

The peer-reviewed "A reevaluation of cancer incidence near ..." by Wing et al. ( https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp9710552 ) concludes that increased incidence of cancer around the plant is not consistent with published estimates of releases.

Evacuation was not suggested until two days after the event, and few did, as there were numerous assurances that it was safely contained.

Disingenuous disavowals of harm no not increase credibility.

[acidburnNSA]

Your link gives me a 404, but it looks like you're referring to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469835/ right? This article does not mention krypton at all, by name. Do you have anything that talks about this statement you made, in particular?

> it all ran downhill and pooled invisibly at the nearest dam where, conveniently, only poor people lived

There's also a pretty good critique of the paper you cited here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469856/pdf/env...

[arethuza]

Nitpicks: the Soviets rather than the Russians - Chernobyl is in Ukraine after all.

Mind you, I wonder if anyone actually explicitly decided not to collect the relevant statistics or whether facts like that were simply ignored by Soviet statisticians if they thought they might give "wrong" answer - there being some history in that area with Stalin and statisticians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937)

[ncmncm]

tl;dr the census accurately counted a deficit of millions of people, so the census takers were executed. There is no telling how many of the "before" count had existed, as previous counts were systematically inflated.

[acidburnNSA]

Fortunately we have dose maps from Chernobyl and have a rough understanding of biological damage vs. dose. Using conservative models, plus the medical records and interviews (WHO and UN got excellent access a few years after Chernobyl happened), we can build pretty good understandings even if census data was questionable. This was accounted for by UNSCEAR, who says "Up to 4000 may die early from Chernobyl" [1]

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

[ncmncm]

Chernobyl did not have a reactor in 1937...

[zelos]

Bhopal was a major case study in the Safety course in my UK Chemical Engineering degree, so at least the lessons learned are taught in the West.

[MaxBarraclough]

If I understand correctly, the Bhopal disaster was the result of irresponsible cost-cutting throughout upper management.

It's not enough that the engineers know what they're doing, if it's a clueless MBA making the policy decisions, no? Especially when they're chasing a bonus, and know they have full legal immunity if they kill people.

[acidburnNSA]

Oh yeah, in industrial circles it's very well known. Just not in the public at large or pop culture.

[cwmma]

disasters in china tend to operate at just a whole different scale then ones in the west, like take the Taiping Rebellion, by some counts the 2nd deadliest modern war and it's not very well known in the west.

[acidburnNSA]

But Chernobyl was in the Soviet Union. This was considered not the west, right?

[cwmma]

I was suggesting why the Chinese disasters may have gotten less play in the west