Chernobyl clean-up expert slams Japan, IAEA

[Fledermaus]

VIENNA | Tue Mar 15, 2011 12:49pm EDT

VIENNA (Reuters) - Greed in the nuclear industry and corporate influence over the U.N. watchdog for atomic energy may doom Japan to a spreading nuclear disaster, one of the men brought in to clean up Chernobyl said on Tuesday.

Slamming the Japanese response at Fukushima, Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev accused corporations and the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of wilfully ignoring lessons from the world's worst nuclear accident 25 years ago to protect the industry's expansion.

"After Chernobyl all the force of the nuclear industry was directed to hide this event, for not creating damage to their reputation. The Chernobyl experience was not studied properly because who has money for studying? Only industry.

"But industry doesn't like it," he said in an interview in Vienna where the former director of the Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency now teaches and advises on nuclear safety. Austria's environment ministry has used him as an adviser.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/uk-japan-nuclear-chernobyl-idUSTRE72E69P20110315

[GliderGuider]

1. A Russian nuclear expert telling the truth!

Who saw that one coming?

[snagglepuss]

4. That sarcasm is unwarranted and unjust to people who are heroic.

Just because you don't hear of them doesn't mean they don't exist. Russian anti-nuke scientists like other anti-nuke activists are often jailed and harassed by authorities and state media ignore them.


snip

Dr. Nataliya Mironova is a prominent leader in the human rights and anti-nuclear environmental movement in Russia. She founded the Movement for Nuclear Safety and was one of the first organizers to press the government openness on pre-Chernobyl nuclear catastrophes.

Natalia Manzurova is an expert in radiation ecology. She works with international ecological and human rights organizations to promote the rights of people affected by radiation. From 1987 to 1992, she led a team in cleaning up the consequences of the accident at Chernobyl atomic power station.


http://gawand.org/2011/03/02/march-2011-calendar-of-events/



Article about physicist jailed for handing out information:

http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2009/Andrei_arrest

[GliderGuider]

6. Of course there are heroic Russians. I'm sorry the target of my sarcasm wasn't clearer

My snark was aimed at the jingoistic American perception that Russian apparatchiks are all secretive dissemblers, imagining the surprise when they discover that's not the case.

One of my all-time heroines is Anna Politskovsaya, who paid the ultimate price for her heroism.

[wtmusic]

9. and Alexander Litvinenko

Russia is speeding towards banana republic status, and Litvinenko's murderer is now a member of the Duma.

[phantom power]

2. "who has money for studying? Only industry" -- reminds me of gulf oil spill aftermath

[damntexdem]

7. Well, governments also have the money, and they're controlled by ...

oh, never mind.

;-)

[wtmusic]

3. Down with corporate pigs like MIT and the World Health Organization!

Health effects of the Chernobyl accident: an overview

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html

Study Finds Chernobyl Radiation Worse than Originally Reported

http://tech.mit.edu/V112/N20/chernobyl.20w.html

Fear is Power!

[Lord Magus]

5. What impeded study of the Chernobyl experience was the paranoid secrecy of the Soviet government.

And aside from both involving nuclear reactors, the Fukushima situation has nothing in common with Chernobyl.

[kristopher]

8. You are just chock full of nuclear industry falsehoods, eh?

While the Soviets did indeed contribute to the problem directly, they and every other nuclear exporting country (read nuclear industry) have actively used their position of power in the international community and within international organizations to derail legitimate investigation for years. The IAEA is their tool, it is not an agent of democratic government.

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health
Alexey B. Nesterenko1, Vassily B. Nesterenko1,†, Alexey V. Yablokov2
Article first published online: 30 NOV 2009 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04822.x © 2009 New York Academy of Sciences

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181, Chernobyl Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment pages 31–220, November 2009

Abstract

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

The meat:
Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct.

Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl.

Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent.


Clear enough? They are accusing these agencies which you are attempting to defend of protecting the nuclear industry. Now, don't you feel silly for being so gullible?