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Shundahai is a Newe (Western Shoshone) word meaning "Peace and Harmony with all Creation"
April 25, 2006
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Scientists Say Chernobyl will Cause 66,000 Cancer Deaths
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986 was the worst industrial accident in history. Picture: IAIN RUTHERFORD TWO British scientists today claimed that the long-term effects of the Chernobyl disaster have been severely underestimated by officials. Their study estimates that the nuclear explosion could eventually cause up to 66,000 deaths from cancer - 15 times more than the formal figures released last September. Almost 20 years after the world's worst industrial accident, the report suggests the impact of the 1986 nuclear disaster on the UK and the rest of the world may never be fully realised. The Other Report on Chernobyl, otherwise known as Torch, will be discussed at a conference at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, ahead of next week's anniversary. It was co-written by Dr Ian Fairlie and Dr David Sumner and will be presented to representatives from the former Soviet Union and the World Health Organisation (WHO). Torch claims that more than half of the fallout from the explosion landed outside Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, contaminating about 34 per cent of the UK's surface. It reveals that there are still restrictions on 374 farms covering 750 square kilometres and 200,000 sheep in the UK. It says that up to 66,000 people globally could die from cancer due to Chernobyl, above the number who would die from cancer normally. This conflicts sharply with the figure from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the WHO, which last September set the number of excess cancer deaths at 4000. Dr Sumner said the International Agency for Research on Cancer had recently released estimated figures only "a little bit lower" than those in the Torch report, while the IAEA had withdrawn its figure of 4000. He said: "The consequences extend all over the northern hemisphere and worldwide really."
Related topic Nuclear energy
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=607322006
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