The Wikipedia article on this is littered with [citation needed] and a commenter of hacker news linked to while stating:
Chernobyl cost several hundred thousand lives. Let's hope and pray Fukushima will not exact a similar cost.
However I read a recent article in the Guardian about a journalist that was seemingly desperately trying to figure out what research backs up such claims. In the link-bait titled article The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all he states:
For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false.
The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world's leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.
Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.
In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising 'almost entirely' from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise 'there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure'. People living in the countries affected today 'need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident'.
Is the probably widespread belief that Chernobyl disaster has caused hundreds of thousand, or even tens of thousand deaths true when examining the literature?
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