How Many People Actually Died Because of Chernobyl?

Trying to answer the main question of this article is like the attempts to staunch the flow of radiation out of the plant after the accident occurred: you think you’ve got a handle on things, but there’s already a whole cloud of stuff spreading further and further out. We do have a few numeric guesses for how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but this number, depending on your definition, who you ask, and when you asked, varies from 30 to 4,000 to 40,000 to 200,000 to up to a million. Why the disparity?

Could the numbers have been improved with swifter action? What do we know about how radiation affects the human body, and what counts as a directly related death? Are we still, now almost 40 years on, seeing repercussions from the worst nuclear disaster in history?

A Brief Overview of the Events of the 26th April 1986

As our focus is going to be on the aftermath and the effects the event had at a local and global level, we won’t go into too much detail here. Basically, due to numerous factors that ironically started during what was supposed to be a safety test, two explosions in one of the reactors caused it to rupture, blasting radioactive material, and the casings supposed to hold the material, onto and out of the roof of the power plant. Fires started on top of the building and, inside the reactor, the graphite that housed the nuclear fuel rods was burning and mixing with the lining of the reactor, creating a magma-like radioactive substance called corium that threatened to burn through the floor.

Here’s where we know the first death toll, as two people were confirmed as having been killed in the explosion — Valery Ilyich Khodemchuk, who was in the pump hall at the time, whose body was never recovered and likely died instantly, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Shashenok who was badly injured by falling beams in the explosion as well as receiving fatal doses of radiation. He was taken to the hospital but died without regaining consciousness. Swiftly added to the tally were 28 other men who were either in the plant at the time or who were the first responders to the site.

Most of these men died in April or May, but a few clung on until June or July 1986. The cause of death for all 28 was Acute Radiation Syndrome, which occurs when a human body receives a large dose of radiation in a short period of time. And these guys received so much radiation.

Unfortunately, there is more than one way of expressing radiation levels and information in one place doesn’t necessarily translate neatly into information found in another but we’ll try and give an overview. Currently, the CDC states that a “large” dose of radiation, i.e. the amount needed to fit the criteria for Acute Radiation Syndrome is anything greater than 0.7 Gray which is the equivalent to 70 rads. There are also things called roentgens and sievert units which are units of measurement to do with the effects of ionizing radiation on the body or the exposure of the body to radiation.

Rads are used to show the amount of radiation absorbed by the body, so probably the most useful unit to us here, although it should be noted that it’s not used everywhere and you’re supposed to use the “gray” unit. It also seems to depend on whether you’re in the United States or not. There was very little consistency between sources.

While this kind of stuff and these distinctions are important, it’s not that important to the end results or the arguments here, so apologies if we inadvertently use the wrong unit in an attempt to explain just how horrifically large the doses of radiation these people got were.

As a comparison, in our everyday lives, the average background radiation level we are exposed to per year is around 2.4 millisieverts or 240 millirem, rems being short for “Roentgen Equivalent in Man”. Anyway, this is tiny and nothing to worry about. If you have a dental x-ray, you are exposed to about 0.004 millisieverts. A chest x-ray will serve up 0.1 millisieverts of radiation and a mammogram will expose you to up to 0.4 millisieverts.

Other types of imaging will expose a body to more radiation, but it’s all still measured in the millis, not even whole units. According to Wikipedia: “One sievert (100 rem) represents a 5.5% chance of developing lethal cancer, when applied to the general population.”

So how much radiation were the people caught up in the Chernobyl explosion and its immediate aftermath exposed to? A lot of them were hit with at least 6 sieverts or 600 rem, either straight away or over the course of trying to fight the fires directly after the explosion. Firefighter Volodymyr Pavlovych Pravyk is given the unenviable title of having received the highest dose of radiation, possibly up to 15 sieverts or 1500 rem.

If you recall, the CDC states that a “large dose” of radiation is 0.7 gray, which is 0.7 sieverts. The first group of victims from Chernobyl received over 8 times that, with many of them exposed to even more. These poor men were in the group that was officially tallied as 28 deaths as a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster.

Adding the two workers who died at the scene, or one did and the other died in the hospital, that brought the number to 30. In 2005, it was amended to 31 as Leonid Petrovich Telyatnikov succumbed to jaw cancer in 2004. He had originally been treated for radiation sickness after having been at the scene for just over two hours and received an estimated 4 to 6 gray or sievert dose.

While he initially recovered, it was taken as a given that his cancer was caused by the event so he was added as a victim even though it was 18 years after the accident. This brings up a major point which we’ll come on to shortly.

You might be wondering why all these men were risking their lives by being in such close proximity to deadly amounts of radiation, but the thing is, while they were extremely brave volunteers, they weren’t really aware of the dangers. Radiation has been called an “invisible enemy” because you can’t see it so you might not be as prepared or as scared as you should be. Also not helping was the fact that nobody who ran the plant was in a hurry to tell anybody else what had happened and how bad it was.

We’ll talk about this in more depth in a minute, but basically, these first responders were sacrificing themselves with no protection and no real knowledge of the situation. They might not have realised the severity of the situation for another reason, too: the latency period of Acute Radiation Syndrome.

What is Acute Radiation Syndrome?

Acute Radiation Syndrome, unfortunately called “ARS” for short, is also known as radiation poisoning or, probably the more well-known, radiation sickness. When the human body is exposed to a huge amount of radiation, like the men at Chernobyl, there is no immediately obvious physical effect. It’s not like running into a fire where your skin will receive visible burns almost straight away.

The radiation will be absorbed into the body, not making itself felt until a certain time later, after what’s known as the “latency period”. This is what was extra sad about the people caught up in the initial blast because no matter how they felt when they were taken in for medical treatment, the specialists at the hospital knew they were dead already.

While the first symptoms of radiation sickness are things like vomiting, diarrhea and general nausea, after that there’s a latency period that can be anywhere from a day to several weeks or sometimes even longer, where the affected person can actually feel totally fine. Unfortunately, though, even with treatment, the amount of radiation these men received was so huge, the damage it caused their bodies was just too overwhelming. Radiation causes bone marrow to deteriorate, which can be replaced with transplants but this will be more successful if you’ve been exposed to a much lower dose than these guys.

Ultimately, the causes of death will be due to fever, hemorrhaging and infection. The gastrointestinal system is also more severely affected by radiation, as cells in the GI tract will start dying off, again, without the patient necessarily being aware. This leads to death by dehydration, fever, severe electrolyte imbalance and infection.

Basically you’re being killed silently from the inside.

Exposure to such high levels of radiation also causes damage and burns on the skin, causing it to turn red and in extreme cases, causing necrosis of the tissues underneath. A photo from the University of Washington Department of Chemistry allegedly received from some Russian colleagues brings us back to the point we made earlier about people not knowing what they were walking into. This photo was of one of the firefighters and his legs looked like there were two large cartoon eyes painted on them. There were two large, almost black circles, one on each of his thighs.

The skin around them was a circle of white and red, looking like a runny egg white. The rest of the skin on his legs was a more brown, tan colour. Here’s what the text said:

This is another picture I received from the Russians. It shows radiation burns on the legs of a firefighter who was working on Chernobyl. He had been walking around the plant and noticed these nice little glowing pellets on the ground.

They were little pellets of glowing fuel from the reactor. They were glowing because of the release of radiation. He picked them up and put them in the pockets of his pants and that’s where he got the very serious radiation burns.

He had since died from the radiation poisoning he received. I thought it was interesting how he picked up these little glowing pieces of fuel and put them in his pockets thinking they were neat. Weren’t they trained or organized to know better than this?

Obviously there was no training at all. Most of these firefighters, including this man, were army soldiers who were just drafted to come and fight this disastrous fire. None of them knew what they were doing at all.

Anyway, as of 2005, the official number of people who died as a direct result of the Chernobyl explosion is 31. That’s the answer to the question this article is about, thank you for reading, the end. Unfortunately, while that is the official death toll, we’re just kidding about this being the end. Now we get to the really depressing stuff.

The Depressing Beginning to the Whole Debacle

You’d like to hope that in the event of an explosion in a nuclear power plant so large that it blasts a hole in the roof and has the potential to take out half of Europe, that you might hear about it in a timely manner so you would be able to take some precautions against possible radioactive material heading your way. Were people living in the immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl plant evacuated on that first day and taken a safer distance away? No, they were not.

Was anyone even aware of the magnitude of the issue? Apart from the managers of the plant, it seems not. Chernobyl stands in modern-day Ukraine, but in 1986 that area was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which meant it was part of the USSR or Soviet Union and therefore ultimately governed by Moscow.

The reactor exploded on the 26th of April, but not even Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, was fully informed of the drastic nature of the situation. According to an interview with him for a 2006 documentary called “The Battle of Chernobyl” by Thomas Johnson, he was informed that there had been an accident and a fire, but that was about it. No explosion was mentioned and certainly no radiation leakage. According to the film, by the evening of the 26th, the radioactivity in the atmosphere above the plant was 600,000 times above normal.

You know what else is in the atmosphere above the plant? Weather. Wind, clouds, that sort of thing. So a huge blast of radiation was shot up into the sky, bat-signal style, and clouds and winds containing these radioactive particles started blowing all over Europe.

It seems incredible to think now, but the first alarm bells about what had happened at the plant came from Sweden, two days after the incident occurred. Researchers there had seen a rise in radiation levels and worked out that it must have come from a major accident elsewhere. Now that they’d been found out, the Moscow government had to let the Ukrainians know what was really happening.

During this time, the town of Pripyat, which was only 3 km away from the plant, or less than 2 miles, had thankfully started being evacuated. It didn’t happen until about 30 hours after the explosion, though, and no orders had been given to give the residents any sort of warning in between. They were not told, for example, that they should try and seal their doors and windows or to start taking iodine tablets which may have helped to counter some of the effects of radiation.

They were just going about their business for that 30 hours, potentially absorbing over 50 times the radiation that’s considered safe to be absorbed in a whole year. There were around 43,000 people evacuated from Pripyat over the space of about 48 hours, but then, almost as incredibly, the military and research teams moved in to that same area. “The Battle of Chernobyl” shows people just sitting around outside, eating and drinking with no apparent safety gear on, in a town that is literally becoming more radioactive by the hour.

So that’s another number to bear in mind — 43,000 people exposed to extreme radiation for over a day before leaving.

Meanwhile, after the first firefighting crew had basically all died, planes were flying over the ruins of the reactor, trying to put out the fire so that the reactor could then be sealed off in some way. People still weren’t given any useful information about how dangerous this was, and some pilots were flying directly over the building over 30 times a day with the crew dropping sandbags into the hole with their bare hands. The level of radiation they were exposed to was over 9 times what’s considered a lethal dose.

I suppose they were only near the reactor for short periods of time, but if you’re flying over that thing more than 30 times a day, it’s going to add up. About 600 people were involved in this aerial operation, so that’s another stat to add to the list.

By the 1st of May, 4 days after the explosion, people in the area were still almost completely unaware of how dangerous the situation was. There had been no headline news, no klaxons, no-one running round the village ringing a bell. One article did appear in the newspapers, but it was a small piece, saying the danger was over.

People were so relaxed about it, in fact, that they were encouraged to get outside in that supercharged radioactive air to enjoy all the May Day worker’s day celebrations. Igor Kostin, who was one of five photographers allowed to contemporaneously document the Chernobyl story, took some photos of local festivities and later called it “a parade of death”. Who knows how many people were exposed to elevated levels of radiation on this day — in some areas it was still being measured at thousands of times above normal levels — but it was just another example of incompetence and/or a cover up.

Gorbachev posited that people were encouraged to go out as a show of faith that nothing was wrong as at the time “that seemed very important to us, to avoid any panic” but he admitted that if more people had been aware of how high the radiation levels were, they wouldn’t have done it.

By the time “The Battle of Chernobyl” was made, by the way, three out of those five Chernobyl photographers were dead. Kostin himself, who flew over the plant in those first few days in a helicopter with the window open to get better shots, spent at least two months a year, every year in hospital since 1986. He died in 2015, although it was a car accident that ended up killing him.

That first helicopter trip wasn’t official, he was acting on a tip-off, but only one of his photos came out, the rest of the film appearing black due to the radiation, which also caused his camera to stop working after about a minute of taking snaps. According to Kostin, the photos he took of May Day celebrations in 1986 are the only official ones left, Ukraine’s media archives having been mysteriously purged of any other footage.

By about the 7th of May, the 30 km exclusion zone had been set up around the Chernobyl plant, removing around 130,000 people from their homes. This was now more than 10 days after the explosion. In case you were wondering, those radioactive clouds were also still floating about, having blown west and reaching everywhere from Britain to Greece. There was probably a lot of radiation-laced rain that fell on a lot of crops for a good couple of weeks.

The Next Stages

Back at the plant itself, the hole that had been blown in the roof had been filled in a bit thanks to the aerial efforts, but the fire was still burning underneath and the radiation levels were continuing to rise. The next issue was that there was potential for that corium, which was still white-hot, to burn and sink through the ground until it reached an aquifer, which would have contaminated the water source of the entire country. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, but something needed to be put underneath to support it, as the concrete slab the reactor had been on was already cracked.

Enter: more humans getting perilously close to the most radioactive thing on the planet. Some poor researchers decided to use a tunnel system to then make a hole in the reactor room wall and stick some equipment through. The readings for the radiation levels were “astronomical”.

So now, a large group of 10,000 miners were brought in from miles away specially for the job, i.e. from a town so far away that they probably didn’t have a clue what had happened. All these miners were in their 20s and 30s and the job was to create a tunnel from further away, to then mine out a large area by the reactor which was going to then hold a liquid nitrogen cooling system to try and bring the temperature of the reactor down. These miners were like the original firefighters, they were not told of the dangers and wore zero protective gear.

Sometimes they wore a kind of face mask but they were working in conditions of up to 50 degrees celsius or 122 Fahrenheit so they usually took them off. They would work in three hour shifts and were receiving approximately 0.01 sieverts per hour, or 1 roentgen. Over the course of the month or so they were working on the excavations, official figures say they received between 30 and 60 roentgens or 0.3 to 0.6 sieverts total.

However, according to survivors interviewed for “The Battle of Chernobyl” film, they reckoned “they received up to five times that amount”. A “large dose” is 0.7 gray, or sieverts, remember. Either way, they were exposed to a lot of radiation, again, with no warning or protection.

Younger people are more affected by radiation than older people and all these miners were very young. According to the film, an estimated quarter of the 10,000 miners died before they reached 40. You can bet your life that the majority of these men died from radiation related cancers or other issues but this particular cohort was not tracked after the event, so that’s another couple of thousand deaths floating around in the ether.

The cooling system was never implemented and the room they’d mined out was eventually filled with cement.

Next on the chopping block were the liquidators. These were a group of around 100,000 military reservists and 400,000 civilian workers such as doctors and nurses, general workers, members of the media and scientists who came in over the course of about a year to try and clear up the site and surrounding areas and work out what to do next. To begin with, people took safety concerns more seriously than they had up to that point and wore masks etc. but after a few days with no apparent ill effects, lots of people stopped wearing them.

One of the first aims was to somehow contain the ruined building to stop all the radioactive dust from spreading but no-one could get close enough to get anything done, people were literally working for a minute at a time, then running away as fast as they could. They ended up using remote control vehicles but it’s still a sorry sight seeing a guy driving something as near as he can get, then getting out and pegging it further down the road when you know in that short space of time he’s already done himself some damage. A large shell was eventually constructed around Chernobyl but it wasn’t even started until the 20th of May, meaning that radionuclides had been spewing out that whole time.

Other things had to be done first, though, like removing hugely radioactive pieces of graphite from the roof. The remote controlled machines started off doing this job, with one shoving the material off the roof while another just buried it in a ditch, which I’m sure was fine, but because the ambient radiation levels were so high, they started malfunctioning, so good old human beings had to take on the task. One piece of this radioactive graphite could kill a man in an hour.

The soldiers who did this task did wear lead-lined suits and worked in 40 second to 1 minute bursts with new crews coming in every 10 minutes, but they were still in the vicinity of lethal amounts of radiation entering and exiting the area. Also, most of these people were making more than one trip up in a day, exposing themselves to more and more radiation. People were passing out where they stood and getting sent home, or getting nosebleeds which meant a trip to the hospital.

One survivor interviewed in the “Battle of Chernobyl” documentary said that his official statement said he had received 20.5 roentgens which is 0.2 sieverts or gray, but he knew he had received several times that. He also said that he was picking up pieces of material that were emitting 1500 roentgens of radiation, or 15 sieverts. He said he couldn’t make a fist with his hand after picking it up.

After putting themselves in deadly peril, the roof clearers only managed to reduce the radiation level on the roof by about 35% but they all got a nice certificate and 100 rubles for their troubles, so I guess it was worth it. Gorbachev said in the video that at the time, a ruble was worth about the same as a dollar which is probably not true but they weren’t so far apart that 100 rubles was a life-changing amount. In today’s money, they got about 300 dollars. I take it back, it wasn’t worth it.

The first containing shell was eventually finished in November 1986. A new steel covering was slid over the old one in 2016.

Let’s talk about the people slightly further afield now. A 30km evacuation and exclusion zone was set up around Chernobyl, leading to around 130,000 people being termed “atomic evacuees”. Most of these people had to leave with nothing and most of them never went back. Some did, though, and small communities of older people, mostly older women, have lived happily back in their old villages inside the exclusion zone for years.

Interestingly, in a 2015 documentary called “The Babushkas of Chernobyl”, a scientist says that the mortality rate was higher among the people who were evacuated than for people who remained inside the contamination zone. The evacuees tended to die younger. He put this down to the stress of having left a homeland and said “Quite simply, people die of anguish.” These evacuees were often subjected to abuse and discrimination from the people in their new towns as they were scared they might bring contamination with them.

The old ladies, or babushkas, living in the contamination zone did have higher radiation readings than normal, however, they were not really told what the levels were, and neither were we, the viewer. At one point, someone says a number and sounds very surprised but we have no clue what unit it’s in, so it’s not very helpful. These women grow and eat food from the soil and trees, one of them makes moonshine and they drink water from the wells.

One of them has a test to see what her cesium level is and while it’s high, it wasn’t at a dangerous level. I’m not sure how accurate this test was though, she was sitting fully clothed in a weird kind of chair, wearing a thick coat and headscarf and at one point her mobile phone went off which was in her pocket. She said she had been treated for thyroid cancer two years after the explosion but had been ok since then.

We mentioned before, that radiation affects younger people more than older people and these ladies were in their late 40s to 50s maybe when the explosion happened which apparently qualifies as old. Most were in their 80s in the documentary, thirty years on. A researcher who visits them periodically said: “The reason why they semi-officially allow the babushkas to live here is because they figured that old age will kill them before any kind of radiation does.”

At the time the documentary was made, there were around 100 people living inside the exclusion zone, the vast majority of which were women. There had been some men but one of the women describes them as “two useless ones.”

Let’s Get Into Some Actual Numbers, Then

We’ve thrown some official statistics out there, and brought up a few more numbers along the way but there are many more numbers to come. As we have found out, not only did the Chernobyl disaster claim some lives almost instantly, thousands of people were kept in harm’s way for days. Radiation was known as the “invisible enemy” as you couldn’t see it which makes it hard to a) take it seriously as a threat and b) reconcile what it might be doing to you.

But it’s also the invisible enemy in that once it’s been absorbed into your body, it will stay there, slowly killing you, unless you’re treated for radiation sickness or something else gets you first. Let’s not forget that radiation was spread across a lot of what was called Belorussia at the time, western parts of Russia and a large swathe of western Europe. How can we possibly work out how many people actually died as a result of the explosion when, in fact, there are probably still people alive now who will end up with Chernobyl-related causes of death?

Before we chuck more depressing numbers in your general direction, let’s pinpoint why there have been such large disparities in the predicted number of victims over the years.

As we just mentioned, radiation sickness has a latency period that means people who received lower doses could think they’re fine for quite a while before eventually becoming sick. While it can cause cancer, the only cancer definitely linked to Chernobyl’s radiation leakage has been thyroid cancer. The thyroid gland in your neck absorbs iodine from your bloodstream, but will also absorb radioactive iodine in the case of overexposure to radiation.

Stupid thyroid gland. Anyway, to have any hope of tracking cancer-cases linked to Chernobyl, the only stat anyone can go on is thyroid cancer stats but here there are a couple of issues. One is that there is no separate bio-marker to distinguish radiation-induced thyroid cancer from any other ways people get thyroid cancer, so even if there is a rise, you can’t tell how many cases could be linked back to Chernobyl.

Another is that a lot of people in the nearest circles to the power plant lived quite rural lifestyles, meaning that there were probably many cases of thyroid cancer that went unreported, undetected and therefore uncounted.

We mentioned various groups that worked in the clean-up of the Chernobyl plant, including the Liquidators, the miners etc. Around 600,000 people were given the status of “liquidator” after the event, ostensibly entitling them to social benefits as a thanks for their help. While some of these liquidators received help with medical issues etc., they were probably the ones that were either more obviously affected or who had access to a specialist medical centre. I’m sure that lots of these people went back to their lives, wherever they came from, and didn’t push for their health rights or just didn’t live anywhere near a place to go to for regular specialist care.

The 10,000 miners who were brought in apparently lived 1000 km away in Tula, Russia. There was no way any local governing bodies overseeing Chernobyl were going to keep track of them afterwards. There was no follow-up from the Soviet government with any of these groups as a whole to see how they were doing in the years following the disaster.

Corruption and cover-ups are yet another reason why it’s been so hard to nail down any definite or even hypothetical numbers about the true cost of the nuclear disaster. We know that the public was not informed of the lethal amounts of radiation in the area for days, and it took a different country pointing out that there must have been an accident for some Soviet Union higher-ups to even realise they hadn’t been given all the information from the plant. This was not helped by the fact that while the plant was in Ukraine, it was actually run from Moscow.

It seemed to be in the leaders’ best interests to pretend that everything was fine and to get people to carry on as normal, even though it meant exposing them to potentially lethal amounts of radiation. This could be because the accident happened due to a variety of factors including design flaws in the reactor, a lack of rigorous safety protocols and good ol’ human error. Basically, it was kind of embarrassing, so the Soviets wanted to play it down on the global stage, even if that meant sacrificing their citizens to prove they were ok with handling their own nuclear power.

Anyway, this lack of transparency from the get-go adds another layer of difficulty to working out the full extent of the disaster.

Here’s what is perhaps the most egregious example of a cover-up: In 1991, Alla Yaroshinskaya, who was the Deputy of the Supreme Soviet at the time, found secret paperwork about the Chernobyl disaster. She found reports saying that by the 12th of May 1986, while authorities were still telling people that everything was fine, over 10,000 people had been hospitalized for symptoms related to radiation sickness and 345 already had lesions from exposure to extreme amounts of radioactivity. That’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that because there were so many people coming in, authorities changed the threshold for the official “safe” dose of radiation to FIVE TIMES what it was previously. That meant that lots of people now magically fell under the standard for what was the new level of care so they were discharged and undoubtedly not counted in any statistics relating to deaths from the Chernobyl explosion.

Another issue with why numbers are so hard to pin down is the way estimates were made, i.e. the methodology chosen by whoever was making that particular estimate. One of the earliest suggestions for future cancer-related deaths from Chernobyl came from Valery Legasov, an inorganic chemist and the chief scientific advisor for a findings committee about the event. A few months after the explosion, he spoke at the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, and said that he estimated that 40,000 people would die of Chernobyl-related cancer in the future.

This caused somewhat of an uproar and he was slammed for just extrapolating that number from data surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. It seems to have been decided at the meeting that 4000 seemed like a far better number, so that’s what the official estimate for the number of people who would likely die in the future from the event became. To be honest, every method people have used to get to any sort of number has been decried by everyone else so it’s not really that helpful.

All we need to know is that people used different methods to estimate future deaths, all of which have had wildly different results and, while this is still affecting people today, we can’t know the real toll until some way into the future. Going back to Valery Legasov for a moment, he himself suffered from radiation sickness after having visited the Chernobyl site many times over the first four months following the explosion. He ended up killing himself two years after the accident and a day before he was supposed to release a report about the failings of the plant and what had led to the explosion.

Did he get entered into the death toll statistics? Doubtful.

The exclusion area around Chernobyl was eventually extended to 30 km, but there were clouds and dust containing radioactive particles that blew all over Europe. The levels were so noticeably high in Sweden, some 1200 km away as the crow flies, that alarm bells about a nuclear accident started to ring. This point is to say that such a large area was contaminated, it’s practically impossible to track any deaths that may have arisen from the explosion outside of the then Soviet Union, which wasn’t exactly keeping careful track itself.

It also brings up the point about what counts as a directly related death. Is that just the people caught up in the initial event who died horribly of acute radiation syndrome? Is it people who went on to die of thyroid cancer with no other health issues?

Or is the net much wider than that? I took a look at the most recent nuclear accident, that of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011. Nobody in the plant died from radiation exposure, so technically, according to some metrics, the death toll from this accident was zero.

However, according to Britannica.com: “Nobody died as a direct result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation exposure. In addition, there have been more than 2,000 disaster-related deaths.

This classification includes deaths caused by suicide, stress, and interruption of medical care.” So there you go. Is it zero, one or two thousand?

Even on a smaller scale, it’s difficult to decide which figures to go with.

Related to this is the idea of “radiophobia” which is basically a population of a place being so keyed up about the effects of radiation that they see every death, or an incorrectly high number of deaths, as having been related to the radiation poisoning in some way. While it may be true that this could skew any data, it’s not without some foundation, as we discussed that authorities knowingly encouraged people to spend time celebrating May Day, for example, when some areas of the country were still highly dangerous. Radiophobia is not the only psychological trauma that came from the accident, either.

We mentioned the atomic evacuees having died from “anguish”, and the Soviet Union broke up only a few years later, meaning that some people were under huge stress from many different factors. Like with the Fukushima example, it’s likely that many people died from “suicide, stress, and interruption of medical care” but there are no figures for us to go with here.

OK, now that we have all that background in mind as to why it’s been so hard to come to any numerical consensus, let’s see what kind of numbers are being touted.

Just by rough estimates, we can easily come to a number way above the 4000 the IAEA decided on for the total number of deaths related to Chernobyl. According to the “Battle of Chernobyl” documentary, which interviewed survivors and officials and used first-hand footage from the event, there were 600 pilots who were flying over the plant multiple times, dropping sandbags in to try and put the fire out. They all died due to the effects of radiation.

Around 25% of the 10,000 young miners died before the age of 40. So added to the pilots, that’s over 3000 people already. A lot of the remaining miners were still suffering from ill health in the documentary which came out in 2006, 20 years after the accident.

They all had the same symptoms, issues with their hearts, nervous system, kidneys and stomach. The majority were aged under 30 when they were tasked with working at Chernobyl, so none of them were past 50 in the film, but they were complaining of being old before their time, not being able to work and seeing their benefits dwindle year on year. I don’t know how many more have died in the 20 years since the documentary, but you know there are going to be more than a few.

Other stats mentioned in the film were that people who were in the liquidator cohort were still going to hospital with symptoms and issues 20 years after the accident. According to the military, in the 20 years since the accident, 20,000 of the 600,000 liquidators died. Again, as little follow-up was done with these people, we don’t know how many were directly caused by radiation sickness and how many might have been for other reasons.

This number seems much higher than other estimates but it’s just over 3% of the number of liquidators which actually seems a pretty small number when you look at it like that. According to the same sources, though, 200,000 of the liquidators were officially registered as disabled in the 20 years between the accident and the documentary, which seems more in keeping with what we’ve heard. Even if 900 people died out of the liquidators, a mere 0.15% of the number of people who spent way too long absorbing high levels of radiation, we’ve already reached 4000 deaths.

Another group that was never studied for long-term radiation effects were the so-called atomic evacuees from the towns and villages in the 30km area zone around the nuclear power plant. There were 130,000 of these people and, while Pripyat was evacuated within 2 days of the explosion, these other people weren’t moved for over a week and weren’t given any safety tips or anything. It’s true, though, that not everyone exposed to radiation is going to die from its effects.

The babushkas of Chernobyl were pretty hale and hearty for ladies in their 80s, probably owing to the fact that just doing their daily chores kept them fit and active, and they only had fresh produce to eat. As previously mentioned, though, they were older when the accident happened so their thyroid glands, for example, would naturally absorb less radioactive iodine than a younger person’s. These ladies were checked on quite regularly but no-one else seems in a hurry to move back to an area that’s still testing as highly radioactive.

In case you were wondering about animals living there, yes, nature has come back in a big way. I was wondering if there were lots of strangely mutated creatures wandering around but apparently, because animals have much shorter lifespans and gestation periods than humans, even if they are affected by the radiation they’ve usually reproduced already before it’s had time to affect them much.

While we’re talking about thyroids, between 1986 and 2002, 1152 children had operations for thyroid cancer in one specialist centre in Ukraine alone. We don’t have figures for any other specialist centres in Ukraine, Russia or Belarus for the same timeframe. This figure is also a bit misleading as many of the children who absorbed large amounts of radiation might not have developed thyroid cancer until they were adults, putting them in a different set to this number.

In a briefing document by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, they say about thyroid cancer:

Our analyses confirmed previous findings of an increased incidence of thyroid cancer due to fall-out from Chernobyl in people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident. This increase was mainly attributable to thyroid cancer cases occurring in the most contaminated areas near the site of the accident.

They then go on to say, however, that while cancer rates increased, mortality rates actually went down as people received prompt treatment. Their own estimate for the predicted number of cancer deaths from the liquidators, people living in the contaminated zones and other exposures across Europe was 16,000 people.

It’s not just being bathed in a nuclear blast that can cause cancer, you can also ingest radioactive materials that could lead to thyroid cancer, and people did. Cows ate grass covered in radioactive particles and people drank their milk. Yay. And here’s where we’re going to start see-sawing back and forth on the data.

While there was an uptick in the number of thyroid cancer cases after the accident, you’ve also got to factor in other things such as an increased awareness of testing for thyroid cancer. Some studies also claim that the incidences of thyroid cancer haven’t really gone up at all, it was just more likely to be reported since the accident and sometimes even over-reported.

Here’s an explanation from the Government of Canada:

Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, as of 2015 there had been almost 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident. Approximately 5,000 of these thyroid cancers are likely attributable to children drinking fresh milk containing radioactive iodine from cows who had eaten contaminated grass in the first few weeks following the accident. The remaining 15,000 cases are due to a variety of factors, such as increased spontaneous incidence rate with aging of the population, awareness of thyroid cancer risk after the accident, and improved diagnostic methods to detect thyroid cancer.

Still sucks for those 5000 kids, though. And there’s got to be more going on, right? What about genetic mutations and stuff like that?

Were there children born with birth defects because of the radiation levels? Yes, of course there were. Or no, there weren’t.

It depends where you look. Do not watch the end of “The Battle of Chernobyl” if you don’t want to see malformed children. I’ll tell you this, though.

There was a doctor who was tracking illnesses in contaminated communities but when he tried to publish his report, he was thrown in prison for 5 years on “corruption” charges. Methinks twas not he who was corrupt. Anyway, he got out and got right back to researching, looking at animals that had consumed grass containing cesium-137, one of the radioactive isotopes blasted all over the place.

He looked at hamster embryos and many of them had no eyes, or no limb development etc. He was shocked at how many he was seeing. Unsurprisingly, no official studies into genetic mutations were carried out post-Chernobyl, but children have been born with the same deformations that the doctor saw in the hamster embryos.

Looking into this further, we come up with stuff like this from the National Institutes of Health:

One of the studies, led by Drs. Stephen Chanock and Meredith Yeager, examined whether radiation exposure causes genetic damage that can be passed to offspring. The researchers sequenced the genomes of 130 children and their parents. The parents had either worked on cleaning up after the accident or were evacuated from the nearby town.

The children were all born at least 46 weeks after the accident and up to the year 2002. The scientists estimated each parent’s radiation exposure based on parents’ reports of their activity and knowledge of environmental radiation around the power plant.

The team looked for random, spontaneous mutations that occurred in the parents’ sperm and eggs. Such “de novo” mutations (DNMs) will appear in children’s genomes but not in either parent’s. The number of DNMs found in the children was similar to that in the general population. This suggests that people exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident didn’t pass on any adverse effects to their children.

Ok, phew. However, you then get first-person accounts such as this from a 2016 BBC piece called “Chernobyl’s Legacy 30 Years On”:

Children are still being born with severe birth defects and rare types of cancer in areas near to Chernobyl, according to a British charity, three decades on from the world’s worst civil nuclear disaster.

The accident on 26 April 1986 contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union, changed the way the world thinks about nuclear energy and has affected an unquantifiable number of people in the region.

For British paediatrician Dr Rachel Furley, the “desperately sad” reality is that women who have spent their entire lives exposed to high levels of radiation are now having children.

She says that in the most severe cases babies have limbs missing and in one case a baby was born with two heads.

Even with these two small examples, if I’d put them the other way around, you may have come away with the impression that there was no increase in birth defects, despite what the British doctor said. According to Viktor Sushko, deputy director general of the National Research Centre for Radiation Medicine, as of January 2018, 1.8 million Ukranians including over 377,000 children had the status of victims of the Chernobyl disaster. How could children who were born decades later be classed as victims if not for having some physical or mental issues arising from the explosion? And here’s an even more depressing statistic — according to the World Nuclear Association’s website:

Robert Gale, a hematologist who treated radiation victims after the accident, estimated that more than 1 million abortions were undertaken in the Soviet Union and Europe as a result of incorrect advice from their doctors about radiation exposure and birth defects following the accident.

I really don’t know what to think about that so I’ll just leave it there.

The now internationally accepted figure of 4000 deaths due to the explosion just seems so woefully low when you start hearing stories from people on the ground. There’s no doubt that people were exposed for much longer than they should have been but also that contaminated food and produce was being sent out willy-nilly. The town of Chernihiv was 50 miles or 80 km away from Chernobyl, more than double the distance of the exclusion zone, yet women in a wool processing plant there were becoming sick, dizzy and getting nosebleeds.

When authorities were called in to check, it was found that people inside the plant were being exposed to more than a year’s worth of radiation within a minute. Because of this, 298 women eventually received liquidator status, which was an acknowledgement that their health had been adversely affected by the Chernobyl accident. It turned out that the wool they were working with had come from contaminated sheep from the Chernobyl area, as well as from sheep that had been contaminated due to the clouds of particles that travelled over the Ukraine and Belarus areas.

In a piece called “The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster” from the BBC in 2019, MIT science historian Kate Brown states the following:

When I visited the wool factory in Chernihiv, I met some of the women who were working at the time.(…) There were just 10 of these women still there. They told me that they were picking up bales of wool and sorting them on tables. In May 1986, the factory was getting wool that had radiation readings of up to 30 Sieverts per hour. The bales of wool the women were carrying were like hugging an X-ray machine while it was turned on over and over again.

The other 288 women originally given liquidator status were either dead by this point or unable to continue working due to ill health. As well as contaminated wool being spread around, contaminated food was also entering the chain. As per Kate Brown again:

They came up with manuals for the meat, wool and milk industries to classify produce as high, medium and low in terms of radiation(…)Meat with high levels, for example, was shoved into a freezer so they could wait until it fell. Medium and low-level meat was supposed to be mixed with clean meat and turned into sausage. It was labelled as normal and sent all over the country, although they were told not to send it to Moscow.

It turns out, though, that after the dust settled — the metaphorical dust, not the radioactive dust, that’s probably still blowing about — that while there were no official Soviet studies or statistics being gathered at the time, individual countries were taking some notes, so this is where the best guess for reasonable stats comes from. Nowadays we can see almost straight away that the 4000 number is total rubbish because by the mid twenty teens, the Ukrainian government was paying benefits to 36,535 widows of the Chernobyl explosion, that is to say, partners of 36,535 men who died as a result of the radiation they received at Chernobyl. I think someone owes Valery Legasov a big apology.

Numbers reported by the individual countries have also been disputed, though, as they have waxed and waned over time. According to the BBC article at least, Ukraine had just under 319,000 liquidators on the books in 2015. Belarus had just under 100,000 and the Russian total was around 157,000. Here’s some more information from “The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster” article by Richard Gray:

​​In Ukraine, death rates among these brave individuals has soared, rising from 3.5 to 17.5 deaths per 1,000 people between 1988 and 2012. Disability among the liquidators has also soared. In 1988 68% of them were regarded healthy, while 26 years later just 5.5% were still healthy. Most – 63% – were reported to be suffering from cardiovascular and circulatory diseases while 13% had problems with their nervous systems.

In Belarus, 40,049 liquidators were registered to have cancers by 2008 along with a further 2,833 from Russia.

This seems like a pretty clear-cut cause and effect type thing, but wait, the IAEA has something to say about it:

The International Atomic Energy Agency, however, says that health studies on liquidators have “failed to show any direct correlation between their radiation exposure” and cancer or other disease.

Is the IAEA just trying to save face with their whole 4000 deaths mess? Mortality rates were also much higher among people who were evacuated from Pripyat and other nearby towns, with doctors saying that it peaked between 2008 and 2012 with 18 deaths per thousand people, which is a tad higher than among the liquidators.

In 2009, Greenpeace estimated that around 93,000 people would end up as victims of the Chernobyl explosion which seems a bit more sensible than 4000 but that’s still what the official number is stuck at.

An article in the National Library of Medicine from 2022 contemplating what could happen in the future in Ukraine called “Health effects of radioactive contaminated dust in the aftermath of potential nuclear accident in Ukraine” states that:

The total radioactive dose from Chernobyl is estimated at 80,000 man-sieverts, and the death toll was more than 200,000”.

The source link did not go to a live page, however, so I’m not sure where that number came from.

In 2010, a book was published called “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” by Alexey Yablokov, Alexey Nesterenko and Vasily Nesterenko. They claim that almost a million deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of the Chernobyl accident.

Another issue with estimating numbers is how “victim” is defined in any of these studies. It seems that a lot of deaths are written off as not related, either because the end cause of death might have been something else, or because of corrections for what was seen as over-reporting by anxious citizens. As per a UN press release called “Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident” from 2005:

Confusion about the impact has arisen owing to the fact that thousands of people in the affected areas have died of natural causes. Also, widespread expectations of ill health and a tendency to attribute all health problems to radiation exposure have led local residents to assume that Chernobyl-related fatalities were much higher than they actually were.

The fact that tens of thousands of atomic evacuees were terrified and devastated at having to leave their homes which might have led to, for example, an increase in drinking or drug-taking etc, which might have ended up as their cause of death, doesn’t count as a death related to the explosion. That’s why we can never know the true number of deaths linked to the disaster because its effects went way beyond the initial event. The IAEA and the UN recognise that psychological harm was done to thousands of people but don’t bracket any deaths together with their staunch stance on the 4000.

On the FAQ page about Chernobyl on the IAEA’s website, there’s a question that says “What are the major health effects for exposed populations?” The response is:

There have been at least 1800 documented cases of thyroid cancer children who were between 0 and 14 years of age when the accident occurred, which is far higher than normal. The thyroid gland of young children is particularly susceptible to the uptake of radioactive iodine, which can trigger cancers, treatable both by surgery and medication. Health studies of the registered cleanup workers called in (so-called “liquidators”) have failed to show any direct correlation between their radiation exposure and an increase in other forms of cancer or disease. The psychological affects of Chernobyl were and remain widespread and profound, and have resulted for instance in suicides, drinking problems and apathy.

While I don’t suppose it’s possible to work out how many deaths were in this “one step removed from the incident” group, you know there are going to be loads. Just on a human level, if someone kills themselves because of years of poor health thanks to being exposed to extreme amounts of radiation, wouldn’t you count that as a Chernobyl-related death? There were so many people registered as disabled or unable to work after the accident, yet any of their subsequent deaths would likely not be counted as directly related either.

Even though the explosion happened almost 40 years ago now, some of the radioactive isotopes are still hanging around, strontium and cesium having half lives of around 30 years. The more dangerous radioactive iodine has decayed away by now and you can go on trips to Chernobyl and the abandoned town of Pripyat, although legally only as part of an organised tour. While you will be exposed to radiation, in small amounts for short periods of time you should be ok. Well, we say that, but because of current invasion issues, ain’t nobody going to Chernobyl at the moment.

Conclusion

So let’s wrap up. We know that millions of people across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and a lot of the rest of Europe were exposed to high amounts of radiation to a greater or lesser degree. We know that 30 men died immediately or within weeks of the original explosion.

We also know that one person who died in 2004, Leonid Telyatnikov, was also added to the official death toll. Why only him? He can’t have been the only person to initially recover only to die of ARS-related problems later.

How was it decided that he even qualified when he died of jaw cancer? Ironically, this could have been caused due to radiation treatments for other forms of cancer. We’ve said that there were 31 deaths but there were around 600 people in the power plant at the time of the accident.

Over 130 people were initially treated for Acute Radiation Syndrome but presumably most of them recovered or recovered enough to be discharged. Maybe only Leonid Telyatnikov was added because he took on a leadership role in the immediate aftermath so might have been more publicly visible afterwards than the other workers there.

All we can say is cover-ups, delays and misinformation at the highest levels put thousands, if not millions lives in danger. People who were children at the time of the accident would only be in their forties now, maybe worrying about long-term effects for themselves and their children. Are we all in agreement that the official estimate of 4000 people dying as a result of Chernobyl seems ridiculously low?

But is it possible to give an estimate of the total number of deaths? Not really, because even now, it’s an ongoing situation and we’re not able to go back and check every person who died in the most affected areas since 1986 and see what shape their bodies were in before they died.

Between think tanks, scientific and medical researchers, publicly released information and academics, the number is apparently somewhere between 4000 and just under a million. At least some lessons were learned, though, so when disaster struck the Fukushima plant, evacuation notices for the nearest residents went out within two hours.

Let’s give the last word to Alla Yaroshinskaya, the Deputy of the Supreme Soviet who found secret paperwork during the hectic times of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the documentary “The Battle of Chernobyl”, she states:

The most dangerous element that came out of the Chernobyl reactor wasn’t cesium or polonium, but lies. The Lie of ‘86, that’s what I call it. A lie that was propagated like the radioactivity throughout the whole country and the entire world.

Due to those lies, we’ll never be able to find out the true toll of the nuclear disaster.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people died immediately as a result of the Chernobyl explosion?

Two people were confirmed as having been killed in the explosion: Valery Ilyich Khodemchuk and Vladimir Nikolaevich Shashenok.

How many people died from Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster?

28 men died from Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) in the immediate aftermath, bringing the total to 30 when including the two initial victims.

What is Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS)?

Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) occurs when a human body receives a large dose of radiation in a short period of time, leading to symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, and general nausea, followed by a latency period where the affected person may feel fine before ultimately succumbing to fever, hemorrhaging, and infection.

How many people were initially treated for Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) after the Chernobyl disaster?

Over 130 people were initially treated for Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) after the Chernobyl disaster.

What was the official number of deaths directly related to the Chernobyl explosion as of 2005?

The official number of deaths directly related to the Chernobyl explosion was 31 as of 2005.

How many people were evacuated from Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster?

Around 43,000 people were evacuated from Pripyat over the space of about 48 hours after the Chernobyl disaster.

What was the size of the exclusion zone set up around the Chernobyl plant?

A 30 km exclusion zone was set up around the Chernobyl plant, removing around 130,000 people from their homes.

How many people were given the status of ‘liquidator’ after the Chernobyl disaster?

Around 600,000 people were given the status of ‘liquidator’ after the Chernobyl disaster, entitling them to social benefits for their help in the cleanup.

What was the estimated number of thyroid cancer cases in children and adolescents exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster?

Between 1986 and 2002, 1152 children had operations for thyroid cancer in one specialist centre in Ukraine alone. As of 2015, there had been almost 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident.

What is the range of estimated deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster?

The estimated number of deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster ranges from 4,000 to nearly 1,000,000, depending on the source and methodology used.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: How Many People Actually Died Because of Chernobyl?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.