The IAEA and the debate on the health effects of Chernobyl

Since the very beginning of the reporting about the accident in the Ukrainian power plant Lenin in late April 1986, the IAEA has played a central role in the evaluation of 'Chernobyl': Hans Blix and Morris Rosen were the first Westerners to visit the site of the accident in May 1986. Some months later, in August 1986, the IAEA organized the 'Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident', a meeting in which Eastern and Western nuclear experts worked out the first (at least from the pro-atomic side) 'universally accepted' narrative of the causes and course of the accident. Furthermore, in the following years, the IAEA acted as a key player in the inter-national and inter-institutional experts groups, the 'International Chernobyl Project' and the 'Chernobyl Forum'. These groups had as their aim to evaluate the environmental and health consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The reports published and the suggestions provided by these expert groups caused uproar within anti-nuclear activists. They especially criticized the low number of victims calculated in these reports and the recommendation to resettle evacuated areas. The reasoning behind this recommendation consists of the belief that life in these regions has to be brought back to normal, as it were more the fear of the radiation and the stress of the resettlement that made people ill than the radiation itself. The struggle about the validity of this concept of 'radiophobia' stands at the centre of the debate on the health effects of Chernobyl. In connection to this debate, we find more and more critical voices that question the independence of the WHO and bring forward the argument that the institutional agreement between the IAEA and the WHO dating back from 1959 has kept the WHO from conducting research and publishing information about health effects of low level radiation. (author)