This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, and the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl incident. Together, these constitute the two greatest nuclear accidents the world has ever seen.

Even now, widespread confusion over these disasters still blights rational discussion on energy production; too often the debate becomes needlessly acrimonious, reliant on rhetoric in lieu of facts. Yet as climate change becomes an ever-encroaching factor, we need more than ever to have a reasoned discussion on nuclear power. To this end, it’s worth dispelling some persistent myths.



The events in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat on the morning of 26 April 1986 have permanently etched the name Chernobyl, and all its connotations, into the public mind. With a dark irony, it was a poorly conducted safety experiment that was the catalyst for the worst nuclear disaster in history. The full odious sequence of events that led to the accident would constitute an entire article. In essence, however, the mixture of flawed design, disabled redundancies and a tragic disregard for experimental protocol all feature heavily in the blueprint of the disaster. The net result of this errant test was a massive steam explosion, replete with enough kick to blow the 2,000 ton reactor casting clean through the roof of the reactor building.

Despite the sheer explosive force of the eruption, what ensued was not a nuclear blast. The spectre of the cold war has left an unfortunate conflation between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, but it is important to note that they operate on very different principles. The Chernobyl explosion was instead a conventional high-pressure failure due to excess steam. Seconds later, the remaining coolant flashed to steam and a second even greater explosion occurred, dispersing the shattered nuclear core and effectively terminating the chain reaction. This second explosion also ejected chunks of graphite moderator into the air, which caught fire, releasing radioactive fallout. It’s estimated that the second explosion released 40bn joules of energy - roughly equivalent to a staggering 10 tons of TNT.

Contrary to all safety regulations, the roof of the reactor complex had been constructed with bitumen, which proved a highly flammable agent. The burning, highly toxic graphite rods ignited at least five fires on the roof of the adjacent reactor. To compound matters further, the night shift and engineering chief squabbled over whether the reactor should be shut downFor several hours workers were in situ with minimal protection. Firefighters arrived on the scene, completely unaware of the dangers they were being exposed to. In the commotion, a helicopter tasked with dumping 5,000 metric tons of sand and neutron-absorbing boron in an effort to quench the flames collided with a crane and spiralled into the ground, killing all four of crew members immediately - a tragic event caught on camera. By 5am the fire had been brought under control, but a number of men had been exposed to high radiation levels and lacked even the most basic protection.

The Soviet response was an unmitigated disaster; rather than admit the fault and take preventative action, the authorities pretended nothing was amiss. In this interim of inaction, hazardous material released in the blast seeped unimpeded into the soil around Pripyat, chief among them radio-iodine 131. This radio-isotope has a half-life of a mere eight days, but if ingested it can accumulate in the thyroid, leading to illness and the potential emergence of thyroid cancer in later life. To circumvent this, those exposed to high levels of radio-iodine are generally given potassium iodide to prevent ill effect. But even this basic prophylactic response was not taken, and residents continued to ingest contaminated food. Finally, a full 36 hours after the explosion, the authorities gave the order to evacuate. This too was likely to have been covered up, had traces of radioactive fallout not been detected at a Swedish nuclear facility the next day, which revealed the scale of the problem to the world.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a tourist attraction. Photograph: Lynn Hilton/Rex/Shutterstock

Chernobyl was a perfect storm, a damning tale of ineptitude leading to needless loss of life. It was also unequivocally the world’s worst nuclear accident. To many, it is also heralded as proof-positive that nuclear energy was inherently unsafe, a narrative adopted by many anti-nuclear groups. The word Chernobyl became synonymous with death on a massive scale. But perception and reality do not always neatly align; in the wake of the disaster, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and others undertook a co-ordinated effort to follow up on health effects. In 2006, after two decades of monitoring they outlined the health effects; of the firefighters exposed to the huge core doses and incredibly toxic smoke, 28 died from acute radiation sickness. A further 15 perished from thyroid cancer. Despite aggressive monitoring for three decades, there has been no significant increase in solid tumours or delayed health effects, even in the hundreds of thousands of minimally protected cleanup workers who helped purge the site after the accident. In the words of the 2008 UNSCEAR report: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.

It added: “The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”

Of course, the fact that the health impact of Chernobyl is far less than people tend to believe should not detract from the tragedy: at least 43 people died as a direct consequence of the disaster and up to 4,000 others exposed in 1986 might yet exhibit some ill effect. Moreover, the scale of disruption in the wake of the incident was enormous, with around 115,000 people evacuated by the authorities from areas surrounding the reactor in 1986. To this day, a 30km exclusion zone around the reactor has been maintained for precaution, despite the radiation level in this boundary being far below that which would cause damage. Unmolested by human hands, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has become an incredible natural wildlife habit and a growing tourist attraction.

But for ideological opponents of nuclear power, this reality is largely ignored; a Russian non-peer-reviewed report garnered headlines with the claim 985,000 died as a result of the accident, a number subsequently exposed as baseless by the Radiation Protection Dosimetry journal. The scientific evidence also undermined Greenpeace, who had long used the spectre of Chernobyl (and more recently, Fukushima) as a prop in their anti-nuclear narrative. They and European Greens scrambled to counter this by releasing “The other report on Chernobyl (Torch)” in 2006 as a counter to the Chernobyl forum. In it, they reported that more than 200,000 deaths might be attributable to the disaster. This figure too is devoid of merit, a transparent attempt to circumvent the scientific consensus. Such empty hyperbole and stubborn insistence on projecting ideology over reality isn’t merely intellectually vapid, it’s actively damaging to the psychological health of survivors.

This is also explicitly touched on in a 2005 World Health Organisation report: “Designation of the affected population as ‘victims’ rather than ‘survivors’ has led them to perceive themselves as helpless, weak and lacking control over their future. This ... has led either to overcautious behaviour and exaggerated health concerns, or to reckless conduct.”

Unlike the accident in the Ukraine, events at Fukushima in March 2011 were not the result of ineptitude but rather a massive natural disaster in the form of a deadly 15-metre high tsunami. The wall of rushing water flooded the Fukushima plant, water-logging the diesel generators that had been cooling the plant, resulting in the leakage of small amounts of nuclear waste product. While the world media fixated on the drama unfolding at the plant, it lost sight of the fact that around 16,000 had just been killed in a massive natural disaster. Despite the preponderance of breathless headlines since the reality is that five years later, radiobiological consequences of Fukushima are practically negligible - no one has died from the event, and is it extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will do so in future. The volume of radioactive leak from the site is so small as to be of no health concern; there is no detectable radiation from the accident in Fukushima grown-food, nor in fish caught off the coast. This of course hasn’t stopped numerous organisations employing Fukushima as an anti-nuclear argument, despite the lack of justification for doing so.

It is important also to see these disasters in the wider context of energy production: when the Banqiao hydroelectric dam failed in China in 1975 in led to at least 171000 deaths and displaced 11 million people. Even windpower has resulted in more than 100 deaths since the 1990s. None of this is to denigrate the vital importance of such technologies, but rather to point out that every form of energy production has some inherent risk. Our reliance on fossil fuels is particularly costly, not only to the environment but to human health; each year, at least 1.3 million people are estimated to die from air pollution. More recent estimates put this figure at 5.5 million.

Yet as I have expanded upon previously for this paper, ideological opposition is hard to overcome and nuclear is no exception. In the wake of Fukushima, Germany acquiesced to demands from lobby groups to shut down its nuclear sector, building heavily polluting fossil-fuel plants in their stead. Japan too suspended its nuclear grid, becoming the second-largest net importer of fossil fuels in the world. Some ostensible environmental campaigners lauded this, oblivious to the fact these decisions condemned the environmental to further damage. If this is “victory” for the environment, it is a resoundingly pyrrhic kind. Shutdown of the plants in Japan has led to not only increased pollution, but rolling blackouts and protests. By contrast, France has for decades produced 75% of its energy through nuclear, and enjoys the cleanest air and among the lowest carbon emissions of any industrialised nature.

The IPCC stress that nuclear power must be considered if we are to halt climate change, with some estimates suggested nuclear capacity needs to double if we are to stave off the worst ravages of climate change. Even so, resistance to nuclear remains, and scare-stories about Chernobyl and Fukushima are too often employed as an empty rebuttal by those unwilling to countenance the situation we face.

Nuclear energy is complicated, has drawbacks, and like any form of energy production it has risks. But it is also clean, safe and hugely efficient. If we truly want to have a rational discussion on how best to power our world, we need to confine ourselves to facts rather than fictions and weigh up the advantages and disadvantages without recourse to ill-founded ideological radiophobia. Our very future depends upon it.