Instead of honoring its victims at this time Chernobyl is referenced to minimize the impact of Fukuchima. Supposedly only 35 people died. The World Health Organization and the IAEA, whose mission is to promote nuclear power, claim that "there is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure from Chernobyl."
That the reality on the ground is very different comes to life in a book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.
The book: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment
The editor: Janette Sherman
PROGRAM NOTES: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, was compiled by Alexey Yablokov, member of the Russian Academy of Science, and Vassily Nesterenko, former director of the Belarussian Nuclear Center.
Yablokov and Nesterenko wrote a synopsis of the over 1,000 titles and more than 5,000 printed and internet publications that reflect the impact of radiation not just on the health of human beings but on the whole ecosystem. They compiled research on rivers and lakes, the soils and the grains and vegetables growing there, wild and domestic animals, birds, fish, fungi, bacteria, viruses, trees, mushrooms, and berries, - a literature that shows that they were all affected, in varying degrees, but without exception.
It is an extraordinary and auspicious coincidence that the book becomes freely available at a time where the world is trying to make sense of Fukushima. The similarities are uncanny, the experience gained and described is potentially life saving. Even the chapter on mitigation, how to treat exposed persons, how to remediate soils that are contaminated, how to get ready to live with contaminations that will persist, can be helpful.
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was first published in 2009 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences - and promptly ignored. After an original print run of only 700 copies the report is no longer available from the Academy. However, the authors and editor are now (April 2011) offering the book for free as pdf file - and they are placing a new print run back into circulation.
This part one of a series of readings. This segment deals with the impact of Chernobyl over time and space, containing evidence that radiation fell over the whole Northern Hemisphere and deposited radiation, some of which that persists to this day.
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