Radiation in small doses does not harm health, and may even reduce the risk of cancer, experts said during the Thursday Chernobyl conference as a lesson for nuclear energy in Poland.
The conference was organized by the Association of Ecologists for Nuclear Energy – Seren.
Chernobyl was the greatest psychological catastrophe in times of peace. It caused relatively small losses in people, but its myth still exists – said prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski.
In his opinion, what happened right after the disaster in 1986 is an example of hysteria caused by the information given in the world’s media. An example is the New York Post newspaper, which a few days after the event wrote about giant chickens running near the forests of Chernobyl.
The average person on Earth receives a natural dose of radiation of just over 2 millisilwerts per year (mSv). As a result of the Chernobyl explosion, this dose increased by 0,045 mSv for the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere for the first year after the accident – said Prof. Jaworowski.
However, there are places in the world where the natural dose of ionizing radiation significantly exceeds 2 mSv, and yet it does not threaten the life or health of the inhabitants. In Ramsar, Iran, the natural dose of ionizing radiation reaches 400 mSv per year, and in Brazil and south-west France over 700 mSv per year – explained Prof. Jaworowski.
As reported by Jaworowski, in the highly contaminated after Chernobyl region of Bryansk in Our Country, the incidence of cancer was 5 percent. lower than in the entire population. In the group most exposed to radiation – who received a dose of 40 mSv – the incidence of neoplasms was 17%. lower than in other regions of Our Country.
MSc. Krzysztof Fornalski from the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Świerk explained that the results of these and many other studies show that low radiation doses do not pose any threats to human life and health. On the contrary, they cause the so-called the body’s adaptive response, reducing the risk of developing cancer.
Small doses of radiation – about 200 mSv per year – can increase the self-healing of the DNA chain as a result of radiation stimulation – explained Fornalski. Besides, when life on Earth was born, the natural radiation on the planet was much higher than it is now, and therefore man is in some way immune to it.
As noted by Dr. Tadeusz Wójcik, the Chernobyl accident significantly inhibited the development of nuclear energy. However, today it is possible to speak of its renaissance again. As many as 60 countries have submitted requests to the International Atomic Energy Agency for an assessment of the legitimacy of building nuclear power plants in their territories. In 2009, 11 new nuclear units were built, 54 units are under construction and this is the highest number since 1992 – he explained.
Dr. Andrzej Strupczewski reassured that now a disaster similar to the one in Chernobyl could not have happened due to a completely different design of the reactors. In modern XNUMXrd generation reactors, after the failure, the reactor’s power automatically decreases, in Chernobyl it increased – noted Dr. Strupczewski. With all the errors that occurred in that reactor, the modern one would just shut down, ‘he added.
In his opinion, the containment of modern reactors is resistant even to the impact of a passenger or military plane (PAP).