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, t hey keep construing parallels with Chernobyl. It is an open question whethe r 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 th e public and, in this way, increase their audience or their sales, which ca n then be used also for political purposes. The disaster in unit 4 of the n uclear 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 n on-nuclear disasters, which tend to be accepted by the public much more rea dily. As far as the number of persons killed or injured is concerned, the s cope of the Chernobyl disaster turned out to be smaller than, or at least c omparable to, other disasters. This is true even in comparison with other p ower generation technologies, for instance, accidents in coal mining or dam bursts. Even major railway accidents, airplane crashes, or the large numbe r of people regularly killed in road traffic, are soon forgotten by the med ia. In the meantime. it has become possible to assess the consequences of the C hernobyl disaster more clearly. Many of the original fears have turned out to be exaggerated. For instance, radioactive contamination in the region ar ound 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 f rom oil spills as a result of tanker accidents, or from accidents in gold m ining of the kind which caused cyanide poisonings in Romania and Hungary in 2000.