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The Scientific Hero of Chernobyl: Alexey V. Yablokov, the Man Who Dared to Speak the Truth

posted by on Friday January 20 2017, @12:46AM   
from the truth-and-perseverance-opposing-industry-spin dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Alexey Yablokov and Chris Busby are biologists whose efforts have been to make people aware of the negative health effects of very low-dose ionizing radiation.

Chris Busby reports via CounterPunch

There will be many obituaries published about Alexey V. Yablokov, the extraordinary Russian scientist, activist, and human being, but I would like to briefly record a few words about the man I knew. And to weep a few tears.

He was a strong [...] friend and fellow fighter for truth, and his recent death on the evening of January 10th means a lot for me--and (though we may [not] know it) for us all on this increasingly contaminated planet.

[...] He, like me, saw the issue of radiation and health as one which was fundamentally a political one, and only secondarily as scientific.

[...] In 1998, [...] Alexey and I [...] with Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alice Stewart, and (later) Molly Scott Cato [...] decided to form an alternative [to ICRP, the International Commission on Radiological Protection]: the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR).

This needed an alternative radiation risk model, and we worked on this over the next five years to create the first ECRR report which was published in 2003 and rose upon the nuclear industry horizon with the brightness of a thousand suns.

[Continues...]

Alexey organised the translation into Russian, and it quickly appeared also in French, Japanese, and Spanish. Alexey suggested we publish a series of books and ECRR reports, and quickly began to put together the first compilation of evidence on Chernobyl effects which we published together in 2006: Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident .

[...] In 2009, he came to the Lesvos conference of the ECRR and made a presentation on Chernobyl effects which we published in the Proceedings. Later, we were in Geneva together and stood vigil together outside the World Health organisation with our sandwich boards. It was freezing. We took the message all over the place. Even after he became ill and had various operations, he would struggle along somehow: we were there in East Berlin, talking about Fukushima.

[...] What Alexey, Inge, and I had in common was the realisation that to win this battle we had to act in several domains: in the scientific literature, in the political area, and in the legal arena also. We had to be brave and accept the attacks and the lies spread about us.

We wrote up the science in books and reports and we began publishing in the peer-reviewed literature; we developed the alternative risk model and entered into court cases as experts and finally in my own case as the legal representative. And it worked: between us we have shaken the foundations of the current bogus structure. And I believe we will ultimately win.

I last saw him in Moscow in 2015 at his 80th birthday celebration to which he invited me (and paid my ticket). A sort of vodka-[fueled] scientific congress. The only other English speaker there was Tim Mousseau. The Russian scientists there were so clever. So honest. Such a change from all the time-serving bastards and idiots I meet in the radiation risk community venues like CERRIE [Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters] or more recently the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We hugged and cried and tossed back the vodka.

But now ... they have all gone. Karl Z Morgan, John Gofman, Ed Radford, Ernest Sternglass, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, and now Alexey. All my old mates. Where are the young scientists to replace them? Nowhere. It is all brush and spin and jobs now.

So: Goodbye Alexey Vladimirovitch. A brave and powerful presence, a big man in every way. Perhaps the last of the warrior scientists.

---

Original Submission

• ''some people never left'' ''some people never left'' (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @10:51AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @10:51AM (#456474)

  The consequences of Chernobyl [alexanderhiggins.com]

  In April of 2011, journalist John Vidal published an account of his visit to the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus. As a result, he challenged any of the pundits now downplaying the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, scientists, mothers, children, and villagers who have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident:

  "It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards, pitifully sick children in the homes, adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos, fetuses without thighs or fingers, and villagers who told us that every member of their family was sick...20 years after the accident and one still sees many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers...Villagers testified that the "Chernobyl Necklace" (thyroid cancer) was so common as to have become unremarkable.

  .
  Wildlife Around Chernobyl Is NOT Plentiful Nor Are The Remaining Animals Healthy [washingtonsblog.com]

  Many have claimed that wildlife is thriving in the highly-radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

  Some claim that a little radiation is harmless...or even good for you.
  [...]
  Are these claims true?
  We Ask an Expert

  [Timothy Mousseau, PhD,] Panelist for the National Academy of Sciences' panels on Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations Near Nuclear Facilities and GAO Panel on Health and Environmental Effects from Tritium Leaks at Nuclear Power Plants [...] has made numerous trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Fukushima--making 896 inventories at Chernobyl and 1,100 biotic inventories in Fukushima as of July 2013--to test the effect of radiation on plants and animals.
  [...]
  [Mousseau] We've tested for mutation rates, estimates of genetic damage, estimates of sperm damage, sperm swimming [i.e. how mobile the sperm are], fertility rates in both females and males, longevity, age distribution of the birds in these different areas, species diversity, etc.

  [Q] And what did you find?

  [Mousseau] The diversity of birds is about half of what it should be in the most contaminated areas. The total numbers of birds is only about a third of what it should be in the most contaminated areas.
  [...]
  there wasn't any rotting fruit on the ground. And considering that every farmer, every landowner would put up fruit trees in that part of the world, you look at the fruit trees and realize there's hardly any fruit on them.

  And of course, that's why there weren't many fruit flies.

  And then it dawned on us, where are the pollinators? And that point, we realized there aren't many bees and butterflies.

  So we started counting the bees, the butterflies, the dragonflies, the spiders, and the grasshoppers.

  And that's when we realized that all of the groups we looked at showed significantly lower numbers in the most-contaminated areas.

  -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

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• Re:''some people never left'' (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday January 20 2017, @08:17PM

  by butthurt (6141) on Friday January 20 2017, @08:17PM (#456679) Journal

  A 2012 article says:

  Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident.

  -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19245818 [bbc.co.uk]

  Parent