Greenpeace puts Chornobyl toll at 100,000 deaths

The long-term effects of the Chornobyl accident on peoples’ health have been grossly underestimated, says the international environmental organization Greenpeace. Official UN data attribute about 4,000 cancer deaths to the nuclear reactor blast that took place 20 years ago, but Greenpeace claims a different figure — 100,000. A report issued by this organization maintains that most of these cases occurred in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In Belarus alone, about 270,000 cases of cancer and 93,000 cancer-related deaths are attributable to the fallout from Chornobyl.

In Russia, the number of lethal cases has reached 60,000. “The figures that were obtained as a result of the work of about 50 high-profile scientists in six countries are dozens of times higher than those cited in the UN report,” say the authors of the just published study.

“The accident at the Chornobyl power plant affected such countries as Greece, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Slovenia, Poland, Rumania, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Italy, Estonia, Slovakia, Ireland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France, and Israel.”

The Greenpeace report claims that recent studies estimate that Chornobyl radiation was or will be the cause of 100,000 cancer deaths, while the official data used by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) grossly underestimate human sufferings, the BBC reports.