☢ The Chernobyl Syndrome: Another example of just how deadly nuclear fear can be

Also: A Quick Q&A on nuclear energy infrastructure with … regulatory policy analyst Thomas Hochman ⚛️

Anyone who watched the gripping 2019 “Chernobyl” miniseries on HBO could be forgiven for thinking the 1986 nuclear disaster caused the deaths of many thousands, including plant workers, cleanup teams, and residents of Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine, and the wider region. There was plenty of conversation among the characters about the terrible human toll that would surely result from the radiation release. 

Especially memorable: This scene in “Please Remain Calm,” the second episode, in which nuclear scientists Ulana Khomyuk and Valery Legasov brief General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and other officials on the catastrophic consequences that could arise if the fire in the Reactor 4 core isn’t extinguished and the large water tanks underneath superheat and explode, expelling radioactive steam:

The water tanks were eventually drained, and there was no mega-explosion that killed tens of millions. Nor, it may surprise viewers, did the radiation released in the initial Reactor 4 explosion kill thousands or even hundreds. The current consensus nearly four decades later is that “approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer.”

But that analysis, it now turns out, excludes another way of measuring Chernobyl’s long-run human toll. In the preliminary working paper, “The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl,” economists Alexey Makarin (MIT), Nancy Qian (Northwestern University), and Shaoda Wang (University of Chicago) explores the dramatic decline in nuclear power plant growth following the Chernobyl disaster, particularly in democratic countries with the highest number of plants at the time. The study focuses on two case studies: the United States and the United Kingdom, examining how coal and oil interests may have leveraged public fear to influence policy against nuclear investment.

From the paper:

In the U.S., we document that: (a) after the Chernobyl accident, campaign contributions to House and Senate races from fossil fuel special interest groups became strongly associated with negative votes on nuclear-related bills, and such donations increased significantly; and (b) newspapers with more fossil fuel advertisements published more anti-nuclear articles after Chernobyl, while we do not observe significant changes in advertisement spending by the fossil fuel industry. In the U.K., MPs sponsored by mining unions were much more likely to give anti-nuclear speeches in parliament after Chernobyl.

Wild stuff, but not as wild as what I think is the paper’s most important finding, one concerning the downstream effects of reduced nuclear investment on air pollution. The researchers estimate that the decline in nuclear plant growth caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the US, 33 million in the U.K., and 318 million globally due to increased air pollution from fossil fuel use.