Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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Of that, over the many, many years, because of the sincere support
and interest of the United States and this Congress, the Commission
was set up to study the health of those people for the rest
of their lives.
At this juncture, 30-plus years later, 70,000 people have died;
14,000 of those from cancer and 415 of those cancers have been concluded
have come from the excess radiation exposure.
I find it very hard to accept the comments of 300,000 cancer
deaths in the Chernobyl accident, where tens of people—not tens of
thousands of people—were killed.
We would love to know enough about exposure so we could make
our estimates and respond to legitimate questions which the Senator
has raised. I agree totally with his remark; we must know. We
must understand those issues and we would like to see the Soviet
Union, perhaps in combination with the World Health Organization,
do the same thing the United States did with the Japan survivors;
study their health through the rest of their lives, and develop
a base through which we can understand better the consequences
of excess radiation exposure.
Senator Domenici. Mr. Taylor, let me ask you—I don't intend to
inquire of each witness, but you mentioned the cancer deaths as a
result of the bomb. Then you said there is a small number that are
directly related to—provable £is related to the excess radioactivity
to which they were exposed.
Is the remaining number of cancer deaths an inordinately high
number of cancer deaths?
Mr. Taylor. No. That is on a statistical basis what one would
expect from that population not associated with overexposure of radiation.
Senator Domenici. All right.
Mr. Taylor. Incidentally, without that carefully study, it would
have been near impossible to even recognize the difference; to be
able to single 400 out of the 14,000 is a difficult task.
Well, to get on then, following our time work, there were long
lists of new requirements and an attempt to require that everything
be done at once. In retrospect, many of the new requirements
were excellent but the effort to implement them without prioritization
led to unforeseen complications.
We believe the industry and NRC both learned much from that
experience and as a minimum, we believe it would be premature to
make proposals for additional changes to U.S. approaches to safety
prior to receiving and analyzing the full report on the accident
from the Soviet Union.
The content of this paper then gets into the discussion of the differences
between these systems, and I don't intend to repeat what
has been said by many capable people on the panel, and hope perhaps
that the record itself will provide some amplification.
The emphasis on the differences is not intended to suggest that
there are no lessons from Chernobyl, but to help us focus on the
facts and to ensure that correct lessons are identified.
One comment, we have divided the differences into reactor
design differences, which have been discussed; containment differences,
which have been discussed; and safety system differences
which have been discussed.