Lying About Chernobyl

It's a popular pasttime on the Left:

Nobody likes to be "had," but that is precisely what has happened to the American public with the documentary Chernobyl Heart. Since winning the Academy Award for "Best Short Documentary" in February 2003, it has received international accolades, has been uncritically quoted in major newspapers, and is being recommended for America's classrooms on the National Education Association's website. HBO has run it continuously since September 2004. Yet while presented as a documentary on the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, it relies to a shocking extent on scientifically unsupportable claims and in some cases outright falsehoods.

Produced in 2002 by Maryann De Leo, it features the work of the Chernobyl Children's Project, a New York-based charity providing aid to those in areas affected by the Chernobyl accident. It is a well-produced, heart-wrenching film with pictures so graphic it is hard to watch: a child with its brain growing outside its head, another with a kidney tumor so large the child cannot be moved, it goes on and on. De Leo later told an interviewer it was the hardest film she ever had to make. Yet without a scientific basis for linking these horrifying scenes to Chernobyl, the documentary harms the very people it is claiming to help.

According to findings of the Chernobyl Forum, released in April 2005, misinformation has been the most significant problem for people affected by the accident. A group of more than 100 scientists representing eight United Nations agencies and the governments of Belarus, Ukraine, and the Federation of Russia, the Forum found that most predictions about the accident have been exaggerated. While many had forecast tens and hundreds of thousands of fatalities, it reports a better estimate from among the population of emergency workers and those in the most contaminated areas is around 4,000. The most noticeable effect has been an increase in thyroid cancers among children, with survival rates fortunately greater than 98%. Otherwise, group concludes, there have been no detectable effects of the accident among the general population: no increase in infant mortality, no increase in birth defects, no increase in cancers, and no effects on immune system function that could be linked to radiation from Chernobyl.

The mistake here is to presume the facts matter. They don't. These people are trying to use fears of Chernobyl to dampen the push for increased nuclear production in the U.S. It was the same thing with "The China Syndrome" and all the other nuclear scare movies of the 70s which are themselves parodied by "The Simpsons."

How safe is nuclear power? Safe enough for thousands of submariners to live, work, and sleep right beside powerful nuclear reactors while out to sea. You would think these folks would be sterile, sick men if the hysterical Green Left were correct.

But then, the whole point is to keep Americans from thinking.