The World Health Organization estimate of the number of people who died from Chernobyl is about 6,000 (though it could be much higher);

Writes Rick Katz

John Mueller's book Atomic Obsession, OUP 2010 deserves to be better known>

Basing himself, apparently, on Peter Finn in the Washington Post, 11 March
2005 and Wade Allison, Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging, OUP 2006, he writes the following<

an exhaustive study by eight United Nations agencies, completed some 20 years after the event, of the effects of the 1986 Cheernobyl nuclear melt-down.....The accident, which lofted a huge amount of radiation into the atmosphere, resulted in the deaths of less than 50 people, most of them unprotected emergency workers.
Thyroid rates among children were raised, but almost all of them were treated successfully and only nine died. The UN study concludes that even in the longer term, cancer rates may rise among the affected population by less -- possibly far less -- than one percentage point. In addition there was no spike in fertility problems or in birth defects.

Ron Dore