25 years after Chernobyl, we don’t know how many died

By Roger Highfield
21 April 2011 A quarter of a century after the world’s worst nuclear accident, experts still can’t agree how many people it killed. Two people died immediately as a result of the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine – then part of the Soviet Union – on 26 April 1986. Another 29 died in hospital during the next few days. The longer-term impact of the radiation, however, has proved harder to quantify. Two decades ago, John Gittus of the Royal Academy of Engineering told the UK government there could eventually be around 10,000 fatalities. Today, some – notably environmental groups – put the death toll well into six figures. But that’s the extreme end of the estimates. “The only deaths that have been firmly established, either individually or statistically, are the 28 victims of acute radiation syndrome and 15 cases of fatal child thyroid cancer,” says Wade Allison of the University of Oxford. …

25 years after Chernobyl, we don’t know how many died