The Other Report on Chernobyl

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The Other Report on Chernobyl , TORCH for short , is a 2006 report by Ian Fairlie and David Sumner on the health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster . The study was commissioned by the Green MEP Rebecca Harms . She was supported by the Altner Combecher Foundation for Ecology and Peace.

According to the report, the previous reports by the IAEA , UNSCEAR and the Chernobyl Forum underestimate the actual damage to health to a considerable extent. In particular, the official reports hardly go into the contamination of European regions outside the center of the accident (the border area between Belarus , Russia and Ukraine ).

In addition, the authors estimate the proportion of radioactive fission products 131 I and 137 Cs to be significantly higher than the official information from the Belarusian government and the IAEA. TORCH states that 40% of the total land area of ​​Europe has been contaminated with at least 4000 Bq / m² cesium. The collective dose caused by this is given by Fairlie and Summer as 600,000 person sievert; 36% of this is from the population of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia; 53% to the population in the rest of Europe and 11% to the rest of the world population. By multiplying the dose and the risk factor, the two authors arrive at a total of 30,000 to 60,000 additional deaths from cancer worldwide by the year 2056 (i.e. 70 years after the disaster). This means that their estimate is almost an order of magnitude higher than the official publications, which expect a maximum of around 9,000 additional cancer deaths in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

The methodology of the study is based on an assessment of the long-term health effects of small radiation doses according to the linear no-threshold model (LNT) over the entire northern hemisphere. The LNT model is based on the assumption that the risk increases linearly with the radiation dose; H. an arbitrarily small dose has implications and that the length of time in which the radiation dose was absorbed is not relevant (a large exposure for a short time is no more dangerous than a small dose for a long time, unlike most health-endangering factors). Many studies show that the LNT model is an overestimation, since living beings have protective mechanisms against small doses of radiation that are no longer effective at large doses.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Comparing Nuclear Accident Risks with Those from Other Energy Sources ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , OECD, 2010 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oecd-nea.org
  2. ↑ M. Tubiana, LE Feinendegen, C. Yang, JM Kaminski: The linear no-threshold relationship is inconsistent with radiation biologic and experimental data. In: Radiology. Volume 251, number 1, April 2009, pp. 13-22, doi : 10.1148 / radiol.2511080671 , PMID 19332842 , PMC 2663584 (free full text).
  3. ↑ The 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection , International Commission on Radiological Protection , Retrieved on July 31, 2015
  4. ^ Health Impacts, Chernobyl Accident Appendix 2 , World Nuclear Association, 2009. Retrieved July 31, 2015.