Nearly 20 years on... we've learned nothing?

Signs bearing the names of towns decimated in the Chernobyl disaster hang in Kiev's Chernobyl museum. AP

Watchdog accused of covering up Chernobyl death toll, Sydney Morning Herald, April 20.

Alright, so it's Greenpeace doing the accusing and a lot of people don't take Greenpeace all that seriously (odd, isn't it, that we don't trust people who are trying to do the right thing for the environment, while we are more comfortable with accepting the word of companies that churn out loads of toxic gasses, test on animals, club seals to death, etc).

But let's be realistic! And remember that the report that Greenpeace commissioned was done by 52 independent scientists (read the Greenpeace press release here and more about the report here) (and while you're about it, there's a great Bulletin article here that focuses on the UN's report).

To quote from the SMH article: "The Chernobyl Forum, a group of eight UN agencies, and governments from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, estimated an eventual death toll of only a few thousand as a result of the April 26, 1986, explosion at the power plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl."

Would you really think that only 56 people died as a direct result of the meltdown and subsequent explosion as the UN agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, claim? And that the maximum number of deaths would be around 4000? Kind of hard to accept, especially when 250 times the amount of radiation was discharged in the accident than that released by the nuclear bomb America dropped on Hiroshima, which had an estimated figure of 118,661 civilian deaths from August 6, 1945, up to August 10, 1946.

And the UN report also suggested "health problems in the region were connected with heavy drinking and smoking and a culture of victimisation." Nice. Blame it on the locals and ignore the damage that nuclear power has the ability to create given the wrong sort of circumstances. Did the UN take lessons from the Soviet regime about "underestimating" disasters? It just seems that governments are so desperate to use nuclear energy that they're willing to ignore and dismiss legitimate concerns about it, as well as huge problems that have come up in the past.

At what cost in terms of human lives, displacement, deaths of animals, environmental destruction, loss of livelihood, etc comes "cheap" nuclear energy?