Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Yet these conclusions were drawn almost entirely from studies conducted on groups of liquidators, often exposed to large doses of radiation, and thyroid cancer sufferers, or from broad risk-projection models. Little effort had been made to establish an internationally recognized body of data on the long-term consequences of the accident on the population at large, to replicate the seventy-year study of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in 1945. The UN agencies used the unreliable nature of dosimetry conducted among civilians as reason enough to abandon any further effort at lifespan studies, and, as a result, the opportunity to understand the long-term impact of low-dose radiation on human beings was lost. In the absence of large-scale epidemiological work, independent scientists from countries around the world continued to log “endocrinological, musculoskeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems and a rise in malignant tumors, especially of the breast and prostate,” among residents of the affected areas. And in the space that remained, anxiety and misunderstanding about the real threats of radioactivity and nuclear power continued to multiply.