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Shellenberger’s review said little about the actual book itself, and instead focused on its rave reception among reviewers, which he thought was criminal. The problem with not reading the actual book is that these critics then mis-characterize it. ...
I show with tens of thousands of pages of documents (you can’t “cherry pick” with that much data) that people lived with levels of radioactivity that would not pass any safety standards today. Much food residents ate over the years was contaminated with Chernobyl radioactivity..
Medical records show that these people were far sicker than we understand. The combination of higher doses than previously understood and communities with significantly elevated rates of disease should be seriously addressed, not dismissed without study as my critics do...
For three decades respected scientists at the U.N. (Giovanni Silini UNSCEAR Director in 1986, Angela Merkel in 1996, and Sir Dillwyn Williams in 2010) have called for a long-term study of the health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. Three decades later, still no study...
We have hundreds of studies of one Chernobyl effect, thyroid cancer, but no study comparable to the Japanese survivor Life Span Study. That study examined the effects on generations of Japanese of one large blast of radioactivity lasting less than a second...
Hopefully no one will ever experience again an atomic bombing. Many humans on the globe are and will be exposed to chronic low doses of radioactivity. That is the knowledge we need to understand...
I do not say that five U.N. agencies were involved in a vast cover-up. A simple reading of Manual for Survival will show that I track the politics of science as the Soviet Union collapsed and the international community took over leading the disaster. ...
critics have little trouble believing that Soviet leaders minimized the health impacts of the disaster, but these same critics are incredulous to believe that a few scientific administrators and scientists worked to help them downplay the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe...
These officials verified evidence of a significant growth in thyroid cancer among exposed children and then did not acknowledge it publicly. ..verification: iaea.org/publications/3…
In the subsequent, key 1991 International Chernobyl Project report, led by the IAEA, the authors stated that rumors of childhood thyroid cancer were “hearsay” and “anecdotal in nature.” proceedings: iaea.org/publications/3…
.. A scientist told me in an interview that he had to work hard to get IAEA officials to include even a prediction of a future bump in pediatric thyroid cancer in the report. The officials in Vienna kept taking it out, he said. ...
I did not write that James Smith did not visit the Chernobyl Zone. I reported that when I called him, asking to follow him in the Zone, he said he had no plans to visit...
I followed at the same time two biologists, Tim Mousseau and Anders Møller, while they worked in the Zone every June and September. They are easy to find. They have been making regular trips since 2016 and have published an amazing number of studies to back up their work...
Other scientists, some who were once critical of their work, have come to agree with them. James Smith has done a great deal of work in this field, and he as he reports on increases in big fauna in the Chernobyl Zone, he is careful to say that the animals' health is a question.
For this work see, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… and ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
The sheer volume of research by Mousseau and Møller in peer-reviewed publications in impressive. academictree.org/evolution/publ… and researchgate.net/profile/Anders…
I report in Manual for Survival that behind the sciences a few key opinion-makers, not the whole U.N., lobbied to dissuade other U.N. agencies from funding their proposed (and often very good) Chernobyl projects.
also lobbied against U.N. funding of a major long-term health study of Chernobyl health effects. Scientists have done a lot of work since 1986 and we now know much more.
The INWORKs study of 308,000 nuclear workers in three countries showed that adult, mostly male nuclear workers who clock in and out of radioactive conditions have significantly elevated rates of cancers and cardiac problems. irsn.fr/EN/Research/Re…
We should know what happens to civilians, children, pregnant women, elderly living 24/7 in Chernobyl levels of contamination. Wakter@simonwakter advocates leaving people in place in the case of “unnecessary evacuations” because resettlement causes “unnecessary suffering.”
Few people would like to face the “release of radioactive materials” without knowing for sure the harm it could cause. I found the first people to abandon the Chernobyl contaminated areas after the accident were doctors. Hospitals worked at half-staff after the accident...
The claim that I have ditto proof for the claims of higher rates of illness and death following the Chernobyl accident than was reported in the now quite dated 2005 Chernobyl Forum report is wholly incorrect and libelous.
In 2016, the Ukrainian government gives compensation to 35,000 people whose spouses died from a documented Chernobyl-illness (National Research Center for Radiation Medicine. That figure just counts people old enough to marry.
Here's that cite: “Thirty Years of Chernobyl Catastrophe: Radiological and Health Effects” (National Report of Ukraine: Kyiv, 2016): 7.)
