Food for thought from Chernobyl
Socioeconomic collapse in an affected society can be more damaging to human health in the aggregate than a large nuclear accident such as Chernobyl, taking into account the then Soviet society's quite well-organised reaction to the latter catastrophe (immediate evacuations, medical treatment, social support, containment...). It is predictable that varying degrees of socioeconomic collapse in various societies worldwide will be caused by forthcoming now unavoidable anthropogenic rapid climate change and accompanying natural systems instability (shifting ecosystems homeostasis), and could also be caused by large-scale warfare using modern weapons as well as natural causes such as earthquakes, volcanoes and asteroid strikes. Rapid socioeconomic collapse can also be more directly caused by financial meltdown and consequent economic paralysis as almost occured in 2008.
It would interesting, I'd like to suggest, to examine and theorise about what can render a society less vulnerable to socioeconomic collapse, whatever the cause, with a view to setting up experiments...
... Analysing dust for radioactive contamination is just a small part of the decades-long study of this vast, abandoned area. The accident turned this landscape into a giant, contaminated laboratory, where hundreds of scientists have worked to find out how an environment recovers from nuclear catastrophe... Today, though, this part of Ukraine is not easily delineated into two categories - contaminated or clean. Research has shown that Chernobyl's aftermath is more complicated, and the landscape here much stranger - and more interesting - than the stringent "do not touch" rules in Narodichi would imply... "Natural radioactivity is all around us - it varies from country to country, from place to place. Most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity worldwide."...
... Many suspect that the radiation has or will cause other cancers, but the evidence is patchy at best. Prof Richard Wakeford, from the University of Manchester's Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health, points out that health studies look for a "signal" of a specific health effect linked to Chernobyl. They aim to pick out that signal above the "background noise" from other causes. That has been incredibly difficult, primarily because of the huge background noise that was the almost simultaneous upheaval of the Soviet Union's collapse.
"It's assumed that there will be some cancers linked to the accident in addition to the thyroid cancers, but detecting them amid that socioeconomic chaos - that had its own impacts on people's health - has proven almost impossible," says Prof Wakeford. Cancer also affects between a third and a half of people in Europe, so any Chernobyl signal is likely to be imperceptibly small.
Amid reports of other health problems - including birth defects - it still is not clear if any can be attributed to radiation...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47227767
= new reply since forum marked as read
