We have been assured that the Japanese nuclear disaster is not as serious as that at Chernobyl. But according to the WHO/IAEA the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t that serious anyway. “Good science” exponent and former head of WHO bodies ICRP and ICNIRP, Dr Michael Repacholi was, of course, in there as always with words of reassurance:

“the health effects of the accident were potentially horrific, but when you add them up using validated conclusions from good science, the public health effects were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.”

Repacholi has also been to the fore in reassuring us about EM radiation from the mobile phone network. In fact, Repacholi’s powers of reassurance are quite exceptional: even deadly depleted uranium is in his view “basically safe”:

“Depleted uranium is basically safe – you can touch depleted uranium for hours and not cause and radiation damage you can ingest it and it’s excreted through the body – 99 per cent of it goes within about a day – you would have to ingest a huge amount of depleted uranium dust to cause any adverse health effect.”

Still just in case you want even more reassurance here’s the WHO’s 2005 press release on Chernobyl twenty years on. There you will learn that:

“This was a very serious accident with major health consequences, especially for thousands of workers exposed in the early days who received very high radiation doses, and for the thousands more stricken with thyroid cancer. By and large, however, we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within a few exceptional, restricted areas.”

WHO

Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident

5 SEPTEMBER 2005 | GENEVA – A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.

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