Chernobyl killed 4 million people

Chernobyl was the worst nuclear disaster in history. Depending on whom you ask, the radiation and the cancer it created killed somewhere between 4,000 and 60,000 on top of the 60 people in and near the power plant that got killed in the initial explosion. But what if I told you that Chernobyl killed an estimated 4 million people more until 2020?

Alexey Makarin and his co-authors examined the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and the way energy policies changed in the US, the UK, and around the globe. Until the disaster in 1986, nuclear power was a growing energy source with more and more power plants built everywhere. After Chernobyl, however, the number of power plants remained roughly constant with growth rates dropping a lot. In democracies, growth rates even turned negative (i.e. the number of nuclear power plants declined).

Growth in nuclear power plants

Source: Makarin et al. (2024)

The result was that the world had to live with older nuclear power plants that stayed operational for longer because they could not be replaced and hence were more likely to have faults and leakages. But more importantly, they document that the fossil fuel industry seized the opportunity presented to them by the disaster.

In the US, the fossil fuel businesses lobbied hard for stricter regulation of nuclear power and spent millions funding the election campaigns of pro-fossil-fuel politicians. In the UK the coal mining unions pushed hard against nuclear power knowing full well that the only replacement available at the time were coal-fired power plants.

And so, the energy mix shifted away from nuclear power to fossil fuels in the decades after Chernobyl. But alas, with the increased use of fossil fuels comes increased air pollution. The air quality deteriorated globally with the visibility on average dropping by 15% in the years after the disaster.

Drop in air quality after Chernobyl

Source: Makarin et al. (2024)

The authors try to estimate how many people have died from this increased air pollution between 1986 and 2020. Acknowledging the large uncertainty around these estimates, they conclude that the rise of fossil fuels in the aftermath of Chernobyl reduced the lives of Americans by a combined 141 million years. In the UK 33 million life years were lost and globally 318 million.

If I simply divide these lost life years by the 80 (the expected lifespan of a person in the US, the UK, and most other developed nations), that amounts to roughly 4 million lives that have been lost due to us retreating from nuclear power. And this doesn’t even start to account for the damage caused to the climate from all the extra energy produced by fossil fuels rather than nuclear power since 1986.