Did You Know How Many Deaths The Chernobyl Disaster Has Caused?

35 Years Later, How Many Deaths Has The Chernobyl Disaster Caused?

35 years after the disaster, the human toll is still very uncertain. The UN scientific committee recognizes only about thirty direct deaths. April 26, 2021 marks the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl plant, located about 100 kilometers from Kiev, exploded during a safety test. For ten days, the nuclear fuel had burned, releasing radioactive elements into the atmosphere which contaminated, according to some estimates, up to three quarters of Europe but especially Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, then Soviet republics.   

A total of 116,000 people had to be evacuated in 1986 from the area around the plant, which is still virtually uninhabited today. 

In the following years, 230,000 others suffered the same fate. In four years, some 600,000 "liquidators" were dispatched to the scene of the accident with little, if any, protection to extinguish the fire, build a concrete screed to insulate the damaged reactor and clean up the surrounding areas.  

To this day, the human toll of the disaster is still debated. The UN scientific committee (Unscear) officially recognizes only about thirty deaths among operators and firefighters killed by acute radiation just after the explosion. But to these are added more indirect deaths, caused by diseases possibly linked to exposure to  radioactivity . The problem is that these deaths are difficult to quantify because the  diseases  can take a long time to appear, and their cause is often difficult to establish. 

Differentt analyzes, and very different figures Thus, Unscear  recorded in 2008  19 deaths of people very highly exposed to radiation between 1987 and 2007 for "various reasons" such as tuberculosis or sudden cardiac arrests. But she believes that "over time, the attribution of radiation as a cause of death has become less certain ."  

In May 2019, a Forbes article  estimated, repeating the report, between 50 and 160 the number of deaths linked to  thyroid cancer  caused by the Chernobyl disaster, "the vast majority of which occurred in the elderly."  But as Liberation explained in June 2019, the UN scientific committee complained in its report of uncertainties around the predictions , and lacked confidence in certain data provided by scientists in the affected countries.  

In 2005, the WHO also estimated that " up to 4,000 people in total could eventually die from radiation exposure following the accident". The following year, a British study called The Other Report on Chernobyl (Torch) , predicted between 30,000 and 60,000 deaths from cancer . Also in 2006, the NGO Greenpeace assured that "the accident resulted in  200,000 additional deaths  between 1990 and 2004".  While the toll of the disaster is not yet clear, and perhaps never will be, authorities estimate that humans will not be able to live in  Chernobyl  safely for 24,000 years .