Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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One of the problems with the International Atomic Energy 1989
Agency survey of the event of 1986 was they didn't know there was
a third administration in the Ministry of Health in the USSR. This
was the secret component. It now has a slightly different name.
But they didn't know it existed, because they didn't know the Soviet
system. They didn't know to ask where the nuclear, biological,
chemical warfare accident data are collected, hidden, not published,
etcetera.
The root cause is you have rules that change diagnostics. You
know, you don't say that somebody has a plague, you call it hepatitis;
or, in this case, acute radiation sickness might be called appendicitis,
or something like that. This was a practice there. There
was a State Secrets Act that was in place at the time.
This occurs, as we saw from the work of Alia Yaroshinska, who
collected some of the protocols of the working group of the Politburo,
which told her to lie, period.
So we have to be very careful that what we're seeing now is not
a major increase compared to what was there before, but you have
to make the balance in both cases. That's part of the problem of
trying to tell what is the excess deaths. Now, I was asked to do
this, at one time, by Radio Liberty, as it happened, and I looked
at normal mortality tables. How many people survive of this age
gproup? Now, the trouble is, I didn't have a precise definition of who
the age group of the liquidators were, the clean-up personnel. But
you can make some assumptions.
It seemed to me, at that time when I did it, 3 or 4 years ago,
there was four to five thousand excess deaths among this group.
Now, they're talking about six to eight thousand. That's in Ukraine
alone. Some people are talking about 20,000 or 30,000. That's in
addition to the thyroid cancer deaths. It's in addition to the infant
mortality deaths. But we don't know precisely.
Somebody from the Ministry of Chornobyl, at this conference that
Mr. Kuzma talked about, at Yale, where I also gave a talk, used
another figure that was, I think, just much too high. Now, he may
be correct, and I may be quite wrong. But that it's all really part
of this difficulty of calculation is really what I'm trying to say.
Mr. Smith. How many people, in your estimation, are still living
in contaminated areas? And what is the threat of people being resettled
in those contaminated areas?
Dr. Feshbach. I really don't know any precise number. I would
guess it's probably several thousand within the 30-kilometer zone.
Nevertheless, even if it's 1,000, or 500, the danger is, of course,
much higher. But, you know, there also are half-lives of these
radionuclides. Iodine-131's is only 8 days, although others may last
longer. Cesium 137 may last 30 years, as well as strontium 90.
But these are elderly people, and you don't know whether it's
going to be the last key to push them over at the last mortality
stage, or it's just overall difficulty of living conditions. But I don't
know the exact number. You get estimates all the time, and I don't
know how good they are. They vary. You might quote something
in January, and somebody in March will say something quite different.