No Risk to Health From Fallout, Agency Asserts

The Nuclear Energy Agency announced Friday that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, as far as is now known, “has caused no significant risk to public health” in the Western industrialized nations and Japan.

The agency, a unit of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, also insisted that the Soviet accident offered no immediate lessons for the Western countries that operate 80% of the world’s nuclear power generating capacity.

The OECD is an official economic association of 24 non-communist nations, and its Nuclear Energy Agency was set up, according to its own publicity, to encourage the development of nuclear power as “a safe, environmentally acceptable and economic” source of energy.

Speaking on behalf of a committee of experts that met to discuss the impact of the Chernobyl disaster, Klaus Stadie, the deputy director of the Nuclear Energy Agency, said the health issue was not closed. He told a news conference that “a more thorough and comprehensive investigation is planned at a later stage when more data are available for analysis.”

However, he added that, based on radiation data from member countries and reports from the World Health Organization, “it may be concluded . . . that at this point the accident has caused no significant risk to public health in any OECD countries, in comparison to other health risks.”

‘Other Health Risks’

Asked to explain the qualification about “other health risks,” John Snihs, a Swedish radiation official, said that “we are always exposed to natural radiation.” Therefore, he went on, radiation levels from the disaster must be compared to ordinary radiation levels to make sense.

“We concluded that the radiation level reaction over the Scandinavian countries was 1% of that caused by natural radiation in a year,” he said.

The experts seemed intent on making it clear that the Soviet accident, since it involved a graphite-moderated reactor, did not require any change in Western reactors, which are mostly moderated by light water.

“On the basis of the currently available knowledge of the accident,” Stadie said, the agency’s committee of experts “estimated that no immediate reaction was required for the construction or operation of nuclear power plants” in Western countries.

On the other hand, Stadie said, the Western countries had learned a good deal about radiation containment after the accident at the light-water power reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in the United States seven years ago. But that reactor was similar to most other Western reactors.

Too Early to Tell

Francois Cogne, director of the French Institute of Nuclear Protection and Safety, said it was simply too early to tell whether the Soviet accident would make other changes necessary. “We do not feel today that there is anything to change,” he said. “Later, we will draw some lessons.”

Cogne, asked to describe what the experts knew about the present situation at the Chernobyl plant, said that there was “likely to be a meltdown of part of the reactor.” But that did not disturb the French official.

“It might, in fact, be the best solution,” he said. “That might be a way of cooling it down and might release less radiation in the atmosphere.”