Scientific American looks at the radiation risks of living near a nuke plant vs. living near a coal fired plant. Their conclusion: the coal plant is more dangerous. How dangerous? Not very.

Dana Christensen, associate lab director for energy and engineering at ORNL, says that health risks from radiation in coal by-products are low. "Other risks like being hit by lightning," he adds, "are three or four times greater than radiation-induced health effects from coal plants." And McBride and his co-authors emphasize that other products of coal power, like emissions of acid rain-producing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrous oxide, pose greater health risks than radiation.

Only 56 people have died as a direct result of radiation released in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, and the final death toll could be thousands fewer than originally feared, the UN nuclear watchdog said today.

However, anxiety caused by fear of death and illness from radiation poisoning is causing major mental health problems among the affected population and such worries "show no signs of diminishing and may even be spreading," the agency said, citing a new report compiled by 100 scientists.

The final death toll attributed to radiation could reach 4,000, said the report, compiled on behalf of the Chernobyl Forum. The Chernobyl Forum includes the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, as well as seven other UN agencies and the governments of Ukraine, where Chernobyl is located, neighbouring Belarus and Russia.

Ukraine has previously said it had already registered 4,400 deaths related to the accident, and early speculation following the radiation release predicted tens of thousands would die.

But Dr Burton Bennett, the chairman of the forum, said that previous death tolls had been inflated, perhaps "to attract attention to the accident, to attract sympathy".

Cross Posted at Power and Control