Discover magazine’s October issue features a list titled “Twenty of the Greatest Blunders in Science in the last 20 years.” One of them was the accident that destroyed one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. Discover said, “A runaway chain reaction blew the steel and concrete lid off the reactor and created a fireball releasing 100 times more radiation than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Some four thousand three hundred people died as a result, and more than seventy thousand were permanently disabled.”

    The explosion at Chernobyl was not a nuclear chain reaction. It was caused by excessive steam pressure. The claim that the accident caused over four thousand deaths and permanently disabled over seventy-thousand people is wrong. Discover’s editor, Stephen Petranek was incredulous when we told him that the best scientific studies of the accident found that it had caused fewer than 50 deaths. He argued that commonsense should tell us that this was ridiculous.

    He was not familiar with the scientific reports. One is from an international conference sponsored by the World Health Organization and others in Vienna in 1996 to assess the health consequences of Chernobyl. It found that three workers in the plant were killed by the explosion. A hundred and thirty four of the men who were rushed in to fight the fire suffered acute radiation sickness, and twenty-eight died within three months. Fourteen more died in the ten years following the accident, bringing the total to forty-five.

    A report issued by the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR, last June confirmed that the total death toll was still less than 50. Petranek didn’t want to grant credibility to any of these figures. Discover’s source for deaths turned out to be a Ukrainian official known to have ties to Greenpeace, the radical environmentalist group.

    OCHA, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was their source for the figure of seventy thousand permanently disabled victims. That was just for the Ukraine. They overlooked OCHA’s claim that there were forty-six thousand disabled victims in Russia and disregarded its only figure for deaths, twenty-eight who died from radiation sickness. The OCHA report was not written by scientists. Lars-Erik Holm, the chairman of UNSCEAR, denounced it in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, saying it was full of unsubstantiated, unscientific statements.

    OCHA took a pessimistic view of what lay ahead, saying “very little is known about the long-term health effects of exposure to radiation.” Chairman Holm said that was false. He pointed out that the only increase in cancer as a result of Chernobyl has been thyroid cancer, which is rarely fatal. Chernobyl was a badly managed horribly designed power plant. The worst nuclear power plant accident imaginable caused very few deaths. It proved that fears of nuclear power are hugely exaggerated. Discover fed those fears instead of reporting that nuclear power should be promoted as a safe solution to our energy problem.

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