Chernobyl today and compared to other disasters

Although the majority of Germans for years have been in favor of continuing operation of the nuclear power plants existing in Germany, nuclear power, in the opinion of the media, is one of the sensitive topics of our society. This is why, even when insignificant events occur in nuclear facilities, they keep construing parallels with Chernobyl. It is an open question whether this is just due to a lack of specialized knowledge about things nuclear, or whether it is driven by the intention to arouse fear in the minds of the public and, in this way, increase their audience or their sales, which can then be used also for political purposes. The disaster in unit 4 of the nuclear power plant of Chernobyl, now Ukraine, occurred fourteen ye ars ago. Although much has been written about the accident, the public still has no proper yardstick by which to assess realistically the risk involved. This is true not only with respect to nuclear power plants of the type found in Germany and almost anywhere in the western world, but also in relation to non-nuclear disasters, which tend to be accepted by the public much more readily. As far as the number of persons killed or injured is concerned, the scope of the Chernobyl disaster turned out to be smaller than, or at least comparable to, other disasters. This is true even in comparison with other power generation technologies, for instance, accidents in coal mining or dam bursts. Even major railway accidents, airplane crashes, or the large number of people regularly killed in road traffic, are soon forgotten by the media. In the meantime. it has become possible to assess the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster more clearly. Many of the original fears have turned out to be exaggerated. For instance, radioactive contamination in the region around Chernobyl today is much lower than expected by pessimists, even though the radioactivity level will remain elevated for many years as a result of the fallout of Cs-137. However. even these consequences can be compared to the damage caused by tornados, floods, dam bursts, or the damage arising from oil spills as a result of tanker accidents, or from accidents in gold mining of the kind which caused cyanide poisonings in Romania and Hungary in 2000.