Chernobyl Toll Was 300, Soviet Lawmaker Says

A Soviet lawmaker said Wednesday that about 300 people--10 times the official figure--had died from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and that the cost of cleanup, resettlement and medical care could be as high as $416 billion.

Yuri Shcherbak, a well-known Ukrainian author who has written a book on Chernobyl, said the death toll was calculated by a public organization called the Chernobyl Union, formed recently in the republic.

He spoke at a press conference during a recess in a session of the Supreme Soviet, which later approved an emergency $26-billion program to help people affected by the explosion and fire at the nuclear power station on April 26, 1986.

About 180,000 to 200,000 people still living in contaminated areas will be resettled under the program.

“The Chernobyl Union, which is gathering its own information, has calculated deaths connected with the accident at about 300,” Shcherbak said. Most were employees at the plant in the Ukraine and emergency workers who rushed there.

But even this figure was not conclusive. “Six hundred thousand people went through the Chernobyl area to eliminate the consequences of the accident,” Shcherbak, a member of the legislature’s Ecology Committee, said.

“It is now difficult to say how many were affected, and we must find these people.”

Moscow has never altered the official death toll of 31, many of them firefighters, who died at Chernobyl. But officials recently have acknowledged that the disaster, which sent a nuclear cloud across Europe, caused more damage than at first announced.

The government newspaper Izvestia said Tuesday that 3 million people are living on radiated territory in the Soviet Union and that evacuations from radiated villages and farms are continuing four years after the accident.

Angered by the disclosures, tens of thousands of people marched in the Ukraine on Sunday to demand officials be put on trial for failing to tell people how dangerous the radiation leak was.

More protests are expected in neighboring Byelorussia today, the fourth anniversary of the disaster.

Shcherbak said the accident could cost Moscow from $300 billion to $416 billion for cleaning up contaminated areas, resettling people and providing medical care and “clean” food for huge sections of the population.