re: #37 Nojay UK

Chernobyl had a reactor running at full power explode and then burn to the atmosphere. That takes the biscuit, nucleonically speaking. Still, saying that the IAEA report about the Chernobyl disaster published about fifteen years later put the confirmed deaths from radioactive release outside the plant at…

32. No, not 32,000 or even 320 but 32. They were all thyroid cancers caused by ingestion of milk contaminated by I-131 from the ‘hot’ reactor. They could have been treated medically but with the mess the country was in after the explosion they didn’t get caught in time. Making cheese would have prevented even that death toll since the months it would take for the cheese made from the contaminated milk to mature would have meant the I-131 would have decayed away to near-nothing.

There were a bunch of people who died from severe radiation poisoning at the reactor site when the explosion happened, some more who suffered ill effects but generally most folks who worked on the site during and after the event survived for decades without issue, even the ‘liquidators’. See also the Fukushima Fifty, the workers at the Fukushima plant who stayed on site as the reactors blew up, dead men walking according to the press at the time, their samurai spirit, yadda yadda. Nearly all of them are still around with no ill effects ten years later. I think the official death toll from radiation released from the Fukushima reactors is one or two people (the one I recall from press reports specified a man who worked on the site died from lung cancer several years after the tsunami and explosions, he was in his mid-50s.)

Full power? The last reading they got before Unit 4 literarily flipped its lid was like 30,000 MW thermal, 10x the 3,000 MW thermal design output…