APART from being a serious industrial accident, the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster 20 years ago this week was a significant socio- and geo-political incident. It helped to break up the Soviet Union and accelerated the end of Moscow's Cold War regime. When I flew from London to Kiev with radia­ tion measuring equipment in an old Tupolev aircraft in 1987, all the seats carried a welcoming Glasnost and Perestroika booklet prepared for West­ ern visitors and signed by the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. There was some irony in the fact that I was the only passenger.

The accident, which occurred overnight on April 25 and 26,1986, was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated by inadequately trained personnel and without proper regard for safety. The resulting steam explosion and fire released about 5 per cent of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and into the local and global environment.

The short and long-term conse­ quences were that 28 people died within four months from thermal and radiation burns. Subsequently there were 19 further deaths from the same causes and there have also been nine deaths from thyroid cancer apparently due to the accident. As of 2005 the total death toll was 56. An authorita­ tive UN report in 2000 concluded that there was no scientific evidence of any significant radiation-related health ef­ fects to most people exposed. And certainly no long-term prognosis for thousands of deaths and genetic muta­ tions and malformations.

Australians, and especially the Aus­ tralian media, should take careful note of the final report of the Chernobyl Study Forum published last Septem­ ber. One hundred top scientists from all UN organisations involved with radiation studies, as well as from the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, helped to dispel the pseudo-science and hysteria that has been used in reporting this event during the past 20 years.

A brief paraphrased summary of the study states "the impact was much smaller than anyone could have pre­ dicted" and now "the danger of radiation has largely passed". The report also says: "People in the area have suffered a paralysing fatalism due to myths and misconceptions about the great threat of radiation.

"This has contributed to a culture of chronic dependency. Mental health coupled with smoking and alcohol abuse is a very much greater problem than radiation, but worst of all at the time was the underlying poor level of health and nutrition."

It is quite predictable that in 2006, visits to Chernobyl by the world media will still focus on the high but decaying radiation levels inside the damaged unit of the power plant. Then there may be emotional but false causal links between this radiation source and video shots of institutionalised chil­dren with disabilities and genetic malformations. Likewise journalists might still be tempted to relate the steam explosion in the reactor core to the distant damage caused by vandal­ism and looting in some homes and public buildings in and around the village of Pripyat near Chernobyl.

Chernobyl 's reassessed medical and societal impacts show that risks as perceived through the human psyche can only be understood by those who undertake a measure of scientific inquiry and then exercise informed realism. Without this, fear and emo­tional blackmail can govern our lives. And there are some who are willing to use the incitement of fear to achieve control over the lives of individuals, communities, and even nations to achieve socio-political goals.

At the time of and soon after the Chernobyl accident, the world media aided and amplified the emotional blackmail through its insatiable desire for sensation and "real time analysis" which in retrospect proved to be false. There have been no apologies for the false reporting and the pseudo-science from some branches of the so-called environmental movement and the media continue this ignoble tradition.

Globally, today — despite Cherno­byl — nuclear power is accepted as the safest form of base load energy. There have been more than 12,500 plant years of safe, greenhouse-free and cheap operational experience in more than 30 countries. There is a renais­sance in the nuclear industry worldwide and Australia is very much involved in this action.

Present uranium sales to the world might well be followed by the develop­ment of a domestic nuclear industry producing electricity, water and hydro­gen for the nation and nuclear fuel manufacture and nuclear waste dis­posal for the global market.

Bear all this in mind the next time you hear Labor's Anthony Albanese or the Greens' Bob Brown fret and wail about the use of nuclear energy.

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