Six Ways Fukushima is Not Chernobyl

5. Much of the public health impact of Chernobyl was the result of the Soviet government’s attempt to cover up the crisis, rather than moving quickly to inform and protect the public.

In Japan, the government evacuated the 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, surrounding the Fukushima plant fairly quickly, and have continued to upgrade the warnings to citizens in the vicinity (although, according to the United States government, not quickly enough).

That didn’t happen at Chernobyl. In the sunny April morning after the explosion, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat were left to go about their business. As the Guardian has noted, children went to school, an outdoor wedding was celebrated, and sunbathers went out to enjoy the good weather, as the plume from the exploded reactor continued to fill the air with radioactive particles.

One of the plant’s employees, who had been away on business, returned home to find his wife outside in the garden, where she was paying no attention to the small pieces of graphite that had landed “on the petals of her wild strawberry plants.” Before long, the sunbathers began to experience strange cases of nausea and vomiting. The town would not be evacuated until the next day. And it was only after heightened levels of radioactivity set off alarms at a nuclear plant in Sweden that the Soviet government finally admitted publicly that something had gone wrong.

The delay and denial had serious implications, including an epidemic of thyroid cancer among about 6,000 people exposed to radiation as children.

As the New York Times noted, this epidemic “would probably not have happened if people had been told to stop drinking locally produced milk, which was by far the most important source of radiation.”

(Russia distributed iodine tablets, as has Japan. But as we reported on Monday, these offer little protection against ingesting contaminating food or milk.)

6. Emergency workers at Chernobyl took few precautions, and may not have been fully informed about the risks they were taking.

The “Fukushima 50” who stayed at the plant on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep containment efforts underway have been facing serious risks. But they have been taking precautions, the Times reported, including breathing through respirators, wearing full-body jumpsuits, and limiting their exposure time.

At Chernobyl, the Guardian wrote:

[The firefighters] had had no protective clothing, or dosimetric equipment to measure radiation levels; the blazing radioactive debris fused with the molten bitumen, and when they had put the fires out with water from their hoses, they picked up chunks of it in their hands and kicked it away with their feet…. This heroic but utterly futile action took them closer to a lethal source of radiation than even the victims of Hiroshima…When they died two weeks later in Hospital No 6, Zakharov heard that the radiation had been so intense the colour of Vladimir Pravik’s eyes had turned from brown to blue; Nikolai Titenok sustained such severe internal radiation burns there were blisters on his heart. Their bodies were so radioactive they were buried in coffins made of lead, the lids welded shut.

The Times noted that 28 of Chernobyl’s emergency workers died from radiation exposure within three months, and more than 100 developed radiation sickness.

Chernobyl’s final toll of deaths and injuries is still a subject of fierce debate. A 2005 Chernobyl Forum report, jointly produced by eight UN agencies and the governments of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Berlarus, concluded that up to “4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure” from Chernobyl, including 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome, 15 children (as of 2005) who had died of thyroid cancer, and a projected total of “3940 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia” among emergency workers, evacuees, and residents of the most contaminated areas around Chernobyl. (The report noted that it’s impossible to tell which cancer deaths in the region were specifically caused by Chernobyl radiation, only that there is an expected 3 percent increase.)

The article originally appeared in ProPublica.