4.9 General Comments of Nuclear Reactor Accidents
A discussion of reactor accidents, with a number of actual accidents highlighted, may leave the reader with the impression that major accidents at nuclear power stations are a common event. They are not. Notwithstanding Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the overall safety record of the nuclear power industry is very good, and serious accidents are extremely rare.
Nuclear power stations cannot explode like a nuclear weapon. Emotive cartoons depicting reactors with mushroom clouds hovering overhead are based on fiction and not facts.
Major reactor accidents are potentially very serious, but even so they must be placed in perspective with other man made and natural disasters. Even the extremely large accident at Chernobyl did not cause any early deaths to off-site personnel. No cases of acute radiation syndrome were diagnosed from amongst the 135 000 people who were evacuated from a 30 km zone around the Chernobyl power station (ref 6). The accident, however, was an extremely serious one. The doses received by these evacuees, typically about 100 mSv, may increase each individual's chance of dying from cancer by about 0.1%. Typically cancer is responsible for about 20-25% of all deaths. The overall increase in risk to individuals is therefore relatively small. Risks to people outside the evacuation zone are significantly smaller still. However, the total number of people exposed to these small increases of risk is large and therefore some additional cancer deaths can be expected over the next few decades.
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