Deepwater Horizon Inspections: MMS Skipped Monthly Inspections On Doomed Rig

Frontline: Nuclear-power opponents overstate the impact of the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Only 31 people died. Some children got thyroid cancer, but it's curable. Even the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings resulted in only a slight increase in long- term cancer risk.



Response: The official Soviet figure of 31 deaths from Chernobyl, more propaganda than science, is universally rejected as far too low. It reflects only short-term deaths from acute radiation poisoning. More recent and realistic assessments suggest that long-term fatalities will number in the tens of thousands. Richard Rhodes should have taken Frontline's camera to Belarus to record the large number of radiation-induced illnesses that are in evidence there. What he would have found is that, as of April 1996, 680 cases of thyroid cancer have been confirmed in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia since the Chernobyl accident, and the number of new cases has risen annually. In some regions of Belarus, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children has increased by a factor of 200 since the accident. Experts on the scene have observed that the type of cancers being seen are "unusually aggressive, often with prominent local invasion and distant metasteses ... this has made the treatment of these children less successful than expected ..."
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