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Obviously I wasn't denying psychological effects. Indeed I hope
they're great enough to force the minions of the nuclear industry
like our chief magistrate to abandon their support for the crazy
technology. No new nukes, and close the ones we have. The Germans
seem to have made a start in that direction, under popular
pressure. Others should be forced to as well.<br>
<br>
I was objecting to the minimizing and false assertion that "...the
stress on the population from fear [had] more health effects than
anything else [at] Chernobyl..."<br>
<br>
<br>
On 3/19/11 12:44 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:307E2580-9C4C-418E-9188-38F5EF5DB6E5@illinois.edu"
type="cite">From the article you presented. There are others, as
also quoted. Search Google…
<div><br>
</div>
<div>…While debate about the health impact continues, there is
little doubt people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus carry a
psychological burden. Repeated studies have found that "exposed
populations had anxiety levels that were twice as high" as
people unaffected by the accident, according to a 2006 United
Nations report. Those exposed to radiation were also "3-4 times
more likely to report multiple <b>unexplained</b> physical
symptoms and <b>subjective</b> poor health than were unaffected
control groups."</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>See also: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/fear-of-radiation-is-a-bigger/">http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/fear-of-radiation-is-a-bigger/</a></div>
<div>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 102, 51); margin-left: 10px;
font-weight: bold; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial,'Nimbus
Sans L',sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">2.5 What was the
psychological impact on exposed populations</h2>
<div style="font-family: Arial,'Nimbus Sans L',sans-serif;
font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/2-health-effects-chernobyl.htm#5p0">http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/2-health-effects-chernobyl.htm#5p0</a></div>
<p style="line-height: 21px; margin-left: 15px; font-family:
Arial,'Nimbus Sans L',sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><em>The
source document for this Digest states:</em></p>
<blockquote class="l3box" style="margin: 20px 0px; padding: 0px
0px 0px 20px; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/structure/quote_left.gif");
background-attachment: scroll; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255); font-family: Arial,'Nimbus Sans L',sans-serif;
font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; background-position: 0%
0%;">
<div class="l3outer" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 0px
0px; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/structure/quote_right.gif");
background-attachment: scroll; background-color: rgb(255,
255, 255); background-position: 100% 100%;">
<div class="l3inner" style="margin: 0px; padding: 5px 15px
5px 5px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); position:
static; z-index: auto;">
<p style="line-height: 21px; margin-left: 15px;"><strong>The
Chernobyl accident resulted in many people being
traumatized by the rapid relocation, the breakdown in
social contacts, fear and anxiety about what health
effects might result. Are there persistent
psychological or mental health problems?</strong></p>
<p style="line-height: 21px; margin-left: 15px;">Any
traumatic accident or event can cause the incidence of
stress symptoms, depression, anxiety (including <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/pqrs/post-traumatic-stress.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="163"
style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0);
cursor: help; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">post-traumatic
stress</a> symptoms), and medically unexplained
physical symptoms. Such effects have also been reported
in Chernobyl-<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/def/exposure-exposed-expose.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="6" style="text-decoration:
none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0); cursor: help;
background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">exposed</a> <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/pqrs/population-population-group.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="162"
style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0);
cursor: help; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">populations</a>.
Three studies found that exposed populations had anxiety
levels that were twice as high as controls, and they
were 3–4 times more likely to report multiple
unexplained physical symptoms and<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/pqrs/subjective-health.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="350"
style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0);
cursor: help; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">subjective
poor health</a> than were unaffected control groups.</p>
<div class="boxfigure" style="margin: 5px; float: right;
font-size: 0.7em; text-align: center; font-style:
italic; border: 1px outset rgb(221, 221, 221); display:
inline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding:
5px 5px 7px; width: 165px; clear: right;"><img
moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/images/p21-1-small.jpg"
alt="Exposed populations had anxiety levels that were
twice as high as controls" title="Exposed populations
had anxiety levels that were twice as high as
controls" style="border-style: none; border-width:
medium; margin: 0px auto; display: block;"
height="106" width="160"><br>
</div>
<div class="boxfigure" style="margin: 5px; float: right;
font-size: 0.7em; text-align: center; font-style:
italic; border: 1px outset rgb(221, 221, 221); display:
inline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding:
5px 5px 7px; width: 200px; clear: right;"><img
moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/images/p21-2-small.jpg"
alt="Exposed populations had anxiety levels that were
twice as high as controls" title="Exposed populations
had anxiety levels that were twice as high as
controls" style="border-style: none; border-width:
medium; margin: 0px auto; display: block;"
height="132" width="200"><br>
</div>
<p style="line-height: 21px; margin-left: 15px;">In
general, although the psychological consequences found
in Chernobyl <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/def/exposure-exposed-expose.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="6" style="text-decoration:
none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0); cursor: help;
background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">exposed</a> <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/pqrs/population-population-group.htm"
class="link-glossary2" id="162"
style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 102, 0);
cursor: help; background-image:
url("http://www.greenfacts.org/images/pixel/006600-pixel-link.gif");
padding-bottom: 0px; background-position: 100% 100%;">populations</a> are
similar to those in atomic bombing survivors, residents
near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident,
and those who experienced toxic exposures at work or in
the environment, the context in which the Chernobyl
accident occurred makes the findings difficult to
interpret because of the complicated series of events
unleashed by the accident, the multiple extreme stresses
and culture-specific ways of expressing distress.</p>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div>As I said, "some believe…" There is considerable evidence. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>--mkb</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
<div>
<div>On Mar 16, 2011, at 6:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>"Some say the stress on the population from fear will
have more health effects than anything else (This was the
case from the Chernobyl accident.)"<br>
<br>
That was surely not the case. Politicians delight in
saying 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself,' but it
seems rarely to be true. See the recent summing-up on the
anniversary of Chernobyl, below. But for a good statement
of the "radiation isn't so bad' case," see <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42347">http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42347</a>>.<br>
<br>
========<br>
"The total death toll and long-term health effects remain
a subject of intense debate even 25 years after the
disaster. '(The disaster) brought suffering on millions of
people ... About 600,000 people were involved in
mitigating the consequences of the accident. About 300,000
of them were Ukrainians. Out of those, 100,000 are
disabled now.' A 2008 United Nations study cited a
'dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence' in the
Ukraine and just across the border in Belarus. Children
seemed to be especially vulnerable because they drank milk
with high levels of radioactive iodine. 'One arrives at
between 12,000 and 83,000 children born with congenital
deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around 30,000
to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide,' German
physicians' organization IPPNW said in a report in 2006.
Those figures are far lower than health officials had
predicted. Indeed, the UN says that overall health effects
were less severe than initially expected and that only a
few thousand people had died as a result of the accident.
But a 2009 book by a group of Russian and Belarussian
scientists published by the New York Academy of Sciences
argued that previous studies were misled by rigged Soviet
statistics. 'The official position of the Chernobyl Forum
(a group of UN agencies) is that about 9,000 related
deaths have occurred and some 200,000 people have
illnesses caused by the catastrophe,' authors Alexei
Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko and Alexei Nesterenko wrote in
'Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe for people and
the Environment'. 'A more accurate number estimates nearly
400 million human beings have been exposed to Chernobyl's
radioactive fallout and, for many generations, they and
their descendants will suffer the devastating
consequences.' The authors argued that the global death
toll by 2004 was closer to 1 million and said health
effects included birth defects, pregnancy losses,
accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney,
gastrointestinal and lung diseases.<br>
'It is clear that tens of millions of people, not only in
Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but worldwide, will live
under measurable chronic radioactive contamination for
many decades,' they wrote..."<br>
<br>
Special Report: In Chernobyl, a disaster persists<br>
By Olzhas Auyezov and Richard Balmforth<br>
<br>
PRYPYAT, Ukraine (Reuters) - Any Ukrainian over 35 can
tell you where they were when they heard about the
accident at the Chernobyl plant.<br>
"I remember calling my husband. There had been rumors for
days about a nuclear accident. We had even hung blankets
on the windows to stop radiation because we didn't know
what to do," said Natalya, a 46-year-old financial analyst
in Kiev, whose husband was a journalist on a daily
newspaper.<br>
"He told me there had been a fire at the atomic plant in
Chernobyl. That was for me the first confirmation that the
reactor had collapsed," she said this week, seated at her
desk in her central Kiev office.<br>
"We had no idea what to expect. It was awful."<br>
As Japan battles to prevent a meltdown at its
earthquake-hit Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, the people
of Ukraine are preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of
the world's worst nuclear accident.<br>
The physical and financial legacies of that disaster are
obvious: a 30-km uninhabited ring around the Chernobyl
plant, billions of dollars spent cleaning the region and a
major new effort to drum up 600 million euros ($840
million) in fresh funds that Kiev says is needed to build
a more durable casement over the stricken reactor.<br>
Just as powerful are the scars that are less easily seen:
fear and an abiding suspicion that despite the reassuring
reports by authorities and scientific bodies people may
still be dying from radiation after-effects.<br>
While debate about the health impact continues, there is
little doubt people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus
carry a psychological burden. Repeated studies have found
that "exposed populations had anxiety levels that were
twice as high" as people unaffected by the accident,
according to a 2006 United Nations report. Those exposed
to radiation were also "3-4 times more likely to report
multiple unexplained physical symptoms and subjective poor
health than were unaffected control groups."<br>
There are, of course, crucial differences between
Chernobyl and the disaster unfolding in Japan.<br>
The Chernobyl accident was the product of human error when
a test was poorly executed, while the Japanese failure was
triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.<br>
Chernobyl occurred in a secretive Soviet society which
reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was only just opening up. The
authorities embarked on an attempted cover-up and only
partly admitted the truth three days later, denying
themselves the chance of rapid international aid.<br>
Despite criticisms that Tokyo could be a lot more
transparent, Japan's disaster has taken place in a
relatively open society and international help has been
quick to come.<br>
Most importantly, thick containment walls at the Fukushima
Daini plant shield the reactor cores so that even if there
was a meltdown of the nuclear fuel it's unlikely to lead
to a major escape of dangerous radioactive clouds into the
atmosphere.<br>
At Chernobyl, there was no containment structure.<br>
"When it blew, it blew everything straight out into the
atmosphere," said Murray Jennex of San Diego State
University.<br>
Despite those differences, though, the Chernobyl
experience still contains lessons for Japan and other
countries, says Volodymyr Holosha, the top Ukrainian
Emergency Ministry official in charge of the area
surrounding the Chernobyl plant.<br>
"We were not ready for it -- neither technologically nor
financially," Holosha told reporters in Kiev last month.
"This is a priceless experience for other countries."<br>
EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG<br>
In the early hours of April 26, 1986, in the model Soviet
town of Prypyat, a satellite of the much bigger Chernobyl,
workers at a nuclear power plant demobilized the safety
systems on the number four reactor, which had come on line
only three years previously.<br>
It was a risky experiment to see whether the cooling
system could still function using power generated from the
reactor alone in the event of a failure in the auxiliary
electricity supply.<br>
It could not. There was a massive power surge that blew
off the reactor's heavy concrete and metal lid and sent
smoldering nuclear material into the atmosphere. Dozens of
plant staff died on the spot or immediately afterwards in
hospital. Hundreds of thousands of rescue workers,
including Soviet Army conscripts, were rushed to the site
to put out the fires, decontaminate it and seal off the
damaged reactor by building a concrete shell around it.<br>
At first, authorities denied there was a problem. When
they finally admitted the truth more than a day later,
many thousands of inhabitants simply picked up a few of
their belongings and headed off -- many of them to the
capital Kiev 80 km (50 miles) to the south, never to
return. Iryna Lobanova, 44, a civil servant, was due to
get married in Prypyat on the day of the explosion but
assumed all ceremonies would be canceled.<br>
"I thought that war had started," she told Reuters this
week.<br>
"But the local authorities told us go on with all planned
ceremonies." Nobody was allowed to leave the town until
the official evacuation was announced on the Sunday" -- 36
hours later -- "following an order from Moscow," she said.<br>
Lobanova went ahead with her wedding -- and left the next
day with her husband by train.<br>
A LEGACY OF BAD HEALTH<br>
The make-shift concrete shelter hastily thrown up in the
months after the explosion is often referred to as a
"sarcophagus", a funeral term made even more fitting by
the fact that it houses the body of at least one plant
worker who rescuers were unable to recover.<br>
The official short-term death toll from the accident was
31 but many more people died of radiation-related
sicknesses such as cancer. The total death toll and
long-term health effects remain a subject of intense
debate even 25 years after the disaster.<br>
"(The disaster) brought suffering on millions of people,"
said the Emergency Ministry's Holosha.<br>
"About 600,000 people were involved in mitigating the
consequences of the accident. About 300,000 of them were
Ukrainians. Out of those, 100,000 are disabled now."<br>
A 2008 United Nations study cited a "dramatic increase in
thyroid cancer incidence" in the Ukraine and just across
the border in Belarus. Children seemed to be especially
vulnerable because they drank milk with high levels of
radioactive iodine.<br>
"One arrives at between 12,000 and 83,000 children born
with congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl,
and around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children
worldwide," German physicians' organization IPPNW said in
a report in 2006.<br>
Those figures are far lower than health officials had
predicted. Indeed, the UN says that overall health effects
were less severe than initially expected and that only a
few thousand people had died as a result of the accident.<br>
But a 2009 book by a group of Russian and Belarussian
scientists published by the New York Academy of Sciences
argued that previous studies were misled by rigged Soviet
statistics.<br>
"The official position of the Chernobyl Forum (a group of
UN agencies) is that about 9,000 related deaths have
occurred and some 200,000 people have illnesses caused by
the catastrophe," authors Alexei Yablokov, Vasily
Nesterenko and Alexei Nesterenko wrote in "Chernobyl:
Consequences of the catastrophe for people and the
Environment".<br>
"A more accurate number estimates nearly 400 million human
beings have been exposed to Chernobyl's radioactive
fallout and, for many generations, they and their
descendants will suffer the devastating consequences."<br>
The authors argued that the global death toll by 2004 was
closer to 1 million and said health effects included birth
defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain
damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and
lung diseases.<br>
"It is clear that tens of millions of people, not only in
Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but worldwide, will live
under measurable chronic radioactive contamination for
many decades," they wrote.<br>
SEALED-OFF ZONE<br>
The most severe contamination occurred within the
so-called Exclusion Zone, a circular area around the power
plant with a radius of 30 kilometers (19 miles) that has
been deemed unsuitable for living and is closed to
unsanctioned visitors.<br>
Several villages and a whole pine forest in the zone were
bulldozed and buried shortly after the disaster. Other
small settlements are overgrown with trees and bushes that
have made the red and white brick houses barely visible.<br>
Prypyat, built to house Chernobyl power plant workers and
their families and with a bright future ahead of it as a
model Soviet 'atomgrad' town, had a pre-disaster
population of about 50,000.<br>
Now it is a ghost town that greets its rare visitors with
eerie silence.<br>
A shop building in the center is full of rubble and broken
furniture -- remnants of years of looting which the
government could not prevent and which spread hazardous
substances across the country.<br>
A portrait of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin lies on
the floor, covered by a thick layer of dust.<br>
At a children's amusement park, a Ferris wheel due to be
launched less than a week after the disaster is rusting
away.<br>
Prypyat's residents, mostly young families, were evacuated
in a six-hour operation which began more than 36 hours
after the accident.<br>
In the days that followed, as the fallout was driven by a
south-east wind across neighboring Belarus, the Soviet
government evacuated thousands of people from other areas
under threat.<br>
"We were evacuated on May 4," said Makar Krasovsky, 73,
who lived in the Belarussian village of Pogonnoye 27 km
(17 miles) from the plant. "Children had been evacuated
earlier, on May 1. Nobody knew anything. Nobody told us
anything."<br>
"We were told to take with us clothes for the next three
days but nothing else because everything was contaminated.
They promised us the reactor would be shut down and we
would return in three days," he said by telephone from the
town of Khoyniki.<br>
Pogonnoye is still sealed off and visits are only allowed
once a year -- on a day when local Orthodox Christians
attend the graves of their ancestors.<br>
FINANCIAL BURDEN<br>
The accident prompted former Socialist bloc nations to
shut down reactors of the same design. But the Chernobyl
plant itself kept running until 2000 when Ukraine agreed
to shut it down after Kiev was promised European aid.<br>
The European Commission and international donors have
since committed about 2 billion euros to projects aimed at
cleaning up the area and securing the plant. Another 740
million euros remains to be raised: 600 million for the
new casement and 140 million waste storage facilities.<br>
Holosha says Ukraine itself has spent much more.<br>
"Since Ukraine gained independence (after the collapse of
the Soviet Union), $12 billion has been spent on dealing
with the consequences (of the accident)," he said. "Most
of the expenditures were linked to maintaining the
exclusion zone and providing healthcare and social
assistance to those who had lived in the affected area."<br>
The key new project at the plant is the construction of
the so-called New Safe Confinement -- a massive convex
structure which will be assembled away from the damaged
reactor and then slid into place over the existing
sarcophagus. The original concrete tomb was built hastily,
is supported in part by the damaged walls of the reactor
building, and has already had to be reinforced.<br>
The new structure is designed to last 100 years and should
allow the reactor to be dismantled without the risk of new
contamination.<br>
The project requires 600 million euros ($840 million) in
additional financing and is likely to miss the 2012
completion target by a few years due to problems such as
radioactive debris encountered during excavation works.<br>
Ukraine hopes to raise most of the funds at an
international donors conference set to take place in Kiev
next month on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the grim
event.<br>
Officials say Ukraine is likely to spend billions of euros
on confinement upkeep costs before it finds a way to bury
the reactor components, perhaps under layers of
underground granite rocks. Even then the area around the
plant will remain unsuitable for thousands of years. Asked
how long before people can settle down and grow crops at
the site, Chernobyl power plant director Ihor Gramotkin
said: "At least 20,000 years."<br>
Yury Andreyev, shift chief at the plant's number two
reactor on the night of the explosions and now head of a
non-government body representing the interests of those
who fought to control the disaster, sees no danger of the
Japan drama taking on the seriousness of Chernobyl.<br>
"The scale of the destruction (in Japan), both nuclear and
radiation, is 10,000 times lower that what happened to us
in Chernobyl. About 30 tonnes of nuclear fuel were
discharged (at Chernobyl). Here (in Japan) there was not
the same discharge," he told journalists on Tuesday.<br>
POLITICAL FALLOUT<br>
Despite the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, both Ukraine
and Belarus still rely heavily on nuclear energy, having
no developed hydrocarbon resources. In the coming months,
both plan to borrow billion of dollars from Russia to
finance the construction of new reactors of Russian
design.<br>
But that doesn't mean people have forgotten. Locals in
Kiev, 80 km (50 miles) from Chernobyl, will still tell you
that they heard no birdsong in the Spring of 1986 and that
the leaves of the elegant chestnut trees that line the
capital's boulevards turned yellow a month early.<br>
The disaster and the government's handling of it
highlighted the shortcomings of the Soviet system with its
unaccountable bureaucrats and entrenched culture of
secrecy. Journalists subsequently uncovered evidence that
the children of Communist apparatchiks had been evacuated
well before others and some staff died at the plant
because they had not been given orders to leave.<br>
Mikhail Gorbachev has since said he considered the
disaster one of the main nails in the coffin of the Soviet
Union which eventually collapsed in 1991. The nuclear
disaster in Japan is unlikely to break the country's
political system. But Tokyo should not underestimate the
profound power of a nuclear meltdown -- physical and
political.<br>
(Olzhas Auyezov reported from Prypyat, Richard Balmforth
from Kiev; additional reporting by Andrei Makhovsky in
Minsk, Natalya Zinets and Pavel Polityuk in Kiev, and
Elaine Lies in Tokyo)<br>
(Editing by Simon Robinson)<br>
© Thomson Reuters 2011.<br>
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