this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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Exactly.
The whole clusterfuck of mishandled Chernobyl cleanup & everything there before and after only claimed a few lives (via direct radiation tissue damage or just accidents).
Compare that with the daily average of thousands of killed in various (ultimately) oil wars.
But we don't even get news about that.
But western propaganda sure showed us malformed babies & claimed it was from radiation - it turns out it was all bullshit, it was always a toxic chemical behind it (unregulated industries selling toxic shit by the tonnes - fertilisers, paints, even biological warfare).
We just take radiation super seriously and completely disregard toxic chemical pollution of eg industrial spillages. People just get to live in polluted areas and die sooner because of that. Instead of living for longer & with less health hazards but with a little radiation.
And lastly - burning coal released way more radiation into air than nuclear accidents.
While I think most of this is true, I do doubt your claim that Chernobyl didn't cause birth defects. Even if it didn't cause defects in humans because they were evacuated, it still caused birth defects in animals that stayed behind. I mean the thing killed a forest. It's easier to cause mutations than outright kill something - this is especially true in the newly conceived.
Thats the thing, no mutations, not even in mice that live in burrows and have like a generation every two seconds. They even did a DNA study by comparing species to the ones not from that area and found no differences.
But the main thing they looked at is cancer rates/signs (ionising radiation causing random mutations resulting in cancer, not superpowers), thats why the mice focus (but the fauna there is thriving, the biggest are deer).
The radiation causing mutation is very theoretical in the sense that the chances if it happening and leading to problems (and DNA corrective measures) seem to be low in the sense that radiation levels needed for that will sooner cause tissue damages too (which ofc is a thing that happens & kills).
There is still a lot we don't know bcs there are so few nuclear accidents (and bomb test) sights to study, but the levels how we defined safe is way on the conservative side.