How Many People Actually Died Because of Chernobyl?

Comments · 739

• A1

  @A13X_H_22 · 1 year ago (edited)

  Spoiler: We will never know. USSR had a bad habbit of destroying accident records. When a bio lab leaked a bio weapon to a town we don’t know how many died either.

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• MA

  @Mastadex · 1 year ago

  I was in Poland during this. I only glow a little, and only on the darkest nights....

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• BE

  @bedazzledjorts · 1 year ago

  I absolutely think that things like preemptive abortion and deaths of displaced people due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide should be counted, because even if they weren't the result of the initial explosion or of radiation, they were the direct result of the poor planning and handling of the disaster by government authorities. Surely, a significant purpose of trying to calculate the human impact of these kinds of disasters is to understand the chain of events that occurred, how they affected people, and what we can learn about it to prevent it from happening again.

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• BU

  @bucketofsunshine6366 · 1 year ago

  Simon has more faith in most likely government funded scientists than I have in a single person in my life.

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• MR

  @MrOneofthousands1994 · 1 year ago

  The problem with Simon’s analogy at the end is that Katy specifically used the term “Chernobyl-related death.” <br><br>That is an entirely different thing than “death caused by Chernobyl.”<br><br>If someone takes their own life after years of physical pain due to the effects of ARS, which they got from Chernobyl, then that is definitely a “Chernobyl-related death.”<br><br>I think the point Katy was trying to make is that the total death toll will vary depending on where you decide to draw the line between “Chernobyl-related deaths” and “death caused by Chernobyl.”

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• CA

  @catherinecroteau-pinney4085 · 1 year ago

  On of the most radioactive places on the planet, still to this day, is the room in the Pripyat hospital where the firefighters left their contaminated fire jackets, gloves, shoes, etc. after being the first responders at Chernobyl on April 26th. &nbsp;Bring a dosimeter into that room and you&apos;ll leave in 2 seconds flat.

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• RE

  @realLordByron · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCoXs3LVjVM&amp;t=4090">1:08:10</a> Simon your analogy is off. A counter point to that would be when initial survivors of school shooting types of events end up taking their own lives later on from either survivor&apos;s guilt, &nbsp;trauma, PTSD, etc. When this has happened they usually symbolically refer to it as the event taking another victim

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• AC

  @aceundead4750 · 1 year ago

  I think we should work to get the Whistler scale accepted by nuclear physicists and engineers across the globe.

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• BR

  @brodsteritaliano5666 · 1 year ago

  Sievert, Grey, Rutherford, Becquerel, Curie, REM, Rad, Roentgen, and CpKG are all the radiation units.

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• DE

  @DeliveryMcGee · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCoXs3LVjVM&amp;t=3002">50:02</a> The principle is called &quot;survivorship bias&quot; and it was statistician Abraham Wald that applied it to bombers in WW2. (Also, he was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, doing secret war work, which as an enemy alien he wasn&apos;t technically allowed to read his own notes because they were classified which led to a rather amusing bit of confusion about how to handle the situation until a federal court stepped in and granted him US citizenship.)

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• IA

  @ianbabcock6802 · 1 year ago

  One of the most terrifying moments of the HBO series was of the liquidators on the roof. The time ran out and one of them tripped when running back. When he was off the roof he noticed that there was a hole in his boot. Then his supervisor said “You are done, comrade”. Sent chills down my spine.

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• BR

  @brew_guy8947 · 1 year ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCoXs3LVjVM&amp;t=4090">1:08:10</a> The analogy is bad. Just imagine the life of the photographer who had to go to the hospital 2 months a year for the rest of his life. That&apos;s not &nbsp;just a trauma from the past, that&apos;s a lifelong battle with insanity.

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