Valentina Drozd walked into the secretary’s office of the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Minsk one day in the fall of 1991, soon after the failed Soviet putsch. The secretary handed her an envelope with a foreign stamp.1 The letter, from the World Health Organization (WHO), announced it was holding a meeting in Germany about Chernobyl health effects and wanted a report about what was going on in Belarus. Drozd’s bosses were out of town. She took it on herself to write a reply, saying she had made some important discoveries about cancers in children’s thyroids, the small butterfly-shaped organ on the throat that regulates hormones. She wanted to share them.
A few months later, Drozd and her boss Larisa Astakhova arrived in the Bavarian town of Neuherberg, near Munich. The women described to the group of European administrators the rise in childhood thyroid cancer from a baseline of 1.9 cases annually in Belarus before the accident to 54 cancers in the year 1991. Most of the children’s cancers were in advanced stages and were extremely aggressive.2 The most cancers issued from the most highly contaminated areas in Gomel Province.3 Children in northern Belarus, where Chernobyl fallout did not rain down, were selected as controls. They showed less significant increases in thyroid nodules and cancers.4 As proof, the women brought biopsies on slides made from window glass they had cut themselves.5
At the meeting, WHO officials, who had been informed about the cancers, pretended it was news to them.6 They expressed skepticism about the existence of a total of 80 new thyroid cancers in two years among 2.25 million Belarusian children. They judged the women’s evidence as patchy. A WHO official criticized the poorly prepared slides.7
The Belarusians’ homemade slides did not dissuade Keith Baverstock, a scientist from the European office of the World Health Organization. He was impressed with Drozd’s well-documented data based on 250,000 measurements. Her research showed that children in Belarus had incorporated extremely high amounts of radioactive iodine in their thyroids, three to ten times more than adults.8 Baverstock understood that the poor, sandy soils of the forested terrain surrounding the Chernobyl plant were naturally low in iodine. Children’s thyroids would have hungrily soaked up radioactive iodine as a replacement for a deficit of the mineral in its stable form. Baverstock also knew of the excess of thyroid cancers among children in the Marshall Islands and Utah. The only question was whether the eighty reported cases were really thyroid cancer. European and American scientists tended to have little confidence in Soviet diagnostic abilities. Baverstock suggested that scientists from the WHO and the European Commission (also at the meeting) form a fact-finding mission to Belarus to look at the cases on-site.9 The mission was set for May. American scientists from the U.S. National Cancer Institute agreed to join them.10
Just as the scientists were preparing to head to Belarus, the mission suddenly dissolved. Baverstock received a letter saying that the European Commission no longer supported the trip. The Americans also withdrew. “Everyone knew of the thyroid cancers,” Baverstock told me over the phone. He assumed the cancellations were political. “There was a dispute in the United States over the doses of thyroid cancers at the Hanford [plutonium plant] and the Nevada Test Site. They didn’t want the issue raised in the US.”11 The European Commission included the European Atomic Energy Community, an agency with a mission of promoting nuclear energy in Europe, a goal that was increasingly difficult amid popular protests against nuclear power.
Wilfred Kreisel, director of the WHO Division of Environmental Health, told Baverstock that he should also pull out of the mission or risk losing his job.12 Undaunted, Baverstock found a Swiss donor, recruited two world specialists in thyroid cancer, and went to hungry, crises-ridden Minsk. Six months later, the number of cancers had grown. At a Minsk clinic, Baverstock’s team saw eleven children with surgical dressings on their necks. They looked at tumor samples, X-rays, and echograms of the child patients. They studied the histological slides of 104 cases and agreed that 102 of them were cancer. The case was clear. There was no way a country the size of Belarus could produce that many cancers at one place at one time without an external factor. “We believe,” the scientists wrote, “that the carcinogenic effect of radioactive fallout is much greater than previously thought.”13
In early September, Baverstock and his collaborators published their findings in Nature, accompanied by letters from Belarusian scientists.14 The scientists announced the unexpectedly early and large spike in cancers in children from the most contaminated regions and underlined that these cases were aggressive and so would have been detected with or without screening.
In the next several issues, scientists wrote letters to Nature refuting the link between the Belarusian cancers and Chernobyl radiation. In a barrage of articles, Valerie Beral from Oxford University, who frequently worked with WHO, Elaine Ron from the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Itsuzo Shigematsu from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, and J. W. Thiessen of the U.S. Department of Energy argued the increase in cancers were most likely due to intensified screening.15 They doubted the cancers were caused by radioactive iodine from Chernobyl. The authors called for a suspension of judgment and for further study. At the same time, Fred Mettler published an article stating he found no difference in thyroid nodules among children in contaminated and noncontaminated areas of the Chernobyl Zone. He advised against any further studies.16 Repetitive and dismissive, the letters read like an orchestrated pile on.
Baverstock’s Nature article caused a feud in the UN family between the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. From WHO, Kreisel wrote to Baverstock’s supervisor in Copenhagen reprimanding him for the mission to Minsk and for the publication in Nature: “While the increase in thyroid cancer, as established by the mission, is consistent with data that have been available to WHO for some time, the publication of the findings without prior consultation with HQ [Geneva headquarters] causes concern.” UN agencies involved in nuclear issues had a practice, Kreisel maintained, of “inform[ing] the other members of major developments with respect to Chernobyl.” Most ominously, Kreisel continued: “One of the members, the IAEA, has been questioning, at the highest level, WHO’s attitude in this instance.”17
According to Baverstock, Kreisel drafted a press release with officials at IAEA, which he presented to Baverstock. Kreisel insisted he sign it and withdraw his name and WHO’s association from the Nature article.18 He told Baverstock he would be sacked if he did not endorse the retraction. In a phone call, Kreisel told me he did not recall the press release but did remember the disloyalty to WHO of an employee who caused “lots of problems, which in my view could have been avoided had this person been released from WHO.”19 Kreisel blocked funding for Baverstock’s independent thyroid initiative.20 In this controversy, Baverstock again stood his ground. He didn’t withdraw his name from the Nature article and he continued to organize forums to publicize and explore the thyroid epidemic.21
The conflict in the pages of Nature sparked a firestorm of medical studies that duplicated and competed with one another.22 Baverstock initiated a thyroid project in Belarus with a cancer research institute in France that rivaled WHO’s slow-moving thyroid study. The IAEA pursued its own investigation of thyroid cancer, violating a prior agreement that the World Health Organization would handle Chernobyl medical issues, while IAEA took care of technical problems.23 The U.S. National Cancer Institute worked up a protocol for a third study, which advanced far more slowly than tumors in children’s glands.24 Japanese, French, British, and German institutions all funded independent investigations.25
In one month, German, Japanese, and French doctors crowded into the small city of Klintsy, each team taking measurements and blood until the residents got fed up with the poking needles.26 Western agencies treated exposed villagers as did Soviet researchers—as experimen tal subjects. Despite promises to return to inform individuals of test results, they often failed to do so.27
Overcome by this confusing mashup of thyroid research, WHO officials traveled from meeting to meeting insisting that they should have a monopoly on the topic for the sake of efficiency and to “avoid duplication.”28
IAEA and WHO officials wrote letters back and forth about Baverstock and his meddlesome pursuit of Chernobyl issues.29 They fought among themselves over control of Chernobyl studies. Officials at WHO argued that they were the UN agency specializing in health. IAEA officials replied they were the experts in radiation.30 With a grant from Japan, WHO officials organized a pilot study of five possible Chernobyl health effects: thyroid cancer, leukemia, oral health, brain damage in utero, and mental health.31 Twenty-five years later, the IAEA’s Abel Gonzalez remembered the WHO study as a personal act of betrayal.32 Gonzalez was furious that WHO officers pursued this program because he believed his IAEA assessment, quickly carried out with no peer review, had conclusively resolved the question; there were no health effects. WHO, he believed, should fall in line with the IAEA’s judgment. Referring to the 1991 IAEA assessment, Gonzalez wrote to the World Health Organization: “The IAEA has . . . the one documented study on Chernobyl which has been peer reviewed [sic] internationally and it should therefore be the major reference base for any international Chernobyl related initiative.” Gonzalez continued, “WHO should tailor its activities” to IAEA’s “recommendations and conclusions.” He called the World Health Organization “adrift” and its projects “scientifically unsound.”33
Gonzalez need not have worried. The goal of the WHO studies, officials wrote to each other, was to pacify a nervous public.34 They did not expect to find increases in leukemia (“doses were too low”), dental problems, or mental retardation (“since the doses were not of that magnitude”). Nikolai Napalkov, assistant director general of WHO, justified the Chernobyl investigations as “important to provide an answer, albeit negative, because the population is very concerned about the possibility of mental effects.”35
In the mid-1990s, Abel Gonzalez and Barton Bennett, scientific secretary at the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation (UNSCEAR), traveled widely and attended meetings where they discouraged medical monitoring as bad science: “fishing in a pond and seeing what fish come out.”36 They fought journalists critical of the IAEA assessment and disparaged scientists who spread “misinformation surrounding the Chernobyl accident.”37 They consistently refused to consider possible health outcomes outside the narrow list prescribed by the A-bomb survivor Life Span Study.38 After Baverstock’s announcement of the thyroid cancer epidemic in Belarus, several UN agencies—including UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization—drew up plans for Chernobyl relief in their fields.39 Bennett at UNSCEAR referred to the IAEA “no health effects” assessment as he advised UN agencies to cancel and defund these Chernobyl projects. When the childhood thyroid epidemic hit the press, Bennett refuted it.40 The IAEA, he said, had shown that radiation levels and food were safe and relocation was not justified, nor were any other urgent measures required. The main humanitarian needs in the region, he insisted, were “unrelated to the accident.”41
The major UN donor, the United States, curiously failed to take a leadership role on Chernobyl relief.42 U.S. diplomats, when they wanted to, had a powerful influence on funding initiatives. They raised three times more in donations than they originally sought to rebuild the crumbling sarcophagus.43 Yet officials in the George H. Bush administration actively blocked fund-raising programs for health, resettlement, and UN-directed research.44
Bennett and Gonzalez coordinated their work from UNSCEAR and IAEA offices located in the same Vienna complex.45 Bennett, in charge of UNSCEAR, had a small budget and borrowed employees and technical expertise from the IAEA.46 Staff cycled between the two agencies. They cooperated so closely that a U.S. delegate suggested saving money by placing UNSCEAR within the well-funded IAEA. Bennett and Gonzalez strongly objected to this plan. The two agencies had incompatible goals, they argued. “The IAEA supports and promotes development of nuclear energy,” Bennett wrote, while “UNSCEAR reports from an independent, objective standpoint on the effects and risks of ionizing radiation. The reputation of UNSCEAR would be severely jeopardized by an association with the IAEA.” Enlisting the help of Fred Mettler, Bennett and Gonzalez successfully quashed the proposal to merge. Meanwhile, the two agencies continued to cooperate closely, the independent UNSCEAR dependent on the richer IAEA for staff and research help.47
Addressing the reported psychological factors, the IAEA published a manual in Russian to teach Soviet leaders how to talk to an anxious public about nuclear issues. Public relations specialists, they counseled, do a better job of informing the public than nuclear physicists. The guide advised public relations specialists to be careful in their language: “Don’t tell the public not to eat vegetables, and then tell them if they do eat them, nothing terrible will happen.” The manual advised against trusting citizens with complicated scientific data and truthful statements: “In discussions with the ‘man on the street,’ it is more important not how exhaustive and scientifically correct your message is, but how it is accepted and understood.”48
In 1994, UNSCEAR initiated a major review of Chernobyl outcomes. Bennett set the parameters. He directed scientists to use the IAEA’s very low dose estimates. Then, pointing out that Chernobyl doses were so low, he guided an investigator toward the results he expected: “This [the dose estimates],” he instructed, “should give you some lack of expectations for your epidemiological studies.”49 He coached a Polish scientist who was drawing up a study of hormesis, the theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health: “We must not take a strongly evident radiological protection point of view . . . I know your intention,” Bennett winked. “With the right words we can greatly limit the amount of discussion needed.”50
UNSCEAR delegates reviewed research on Chernobyl health effects that included the work of Soviet researchers whose results pointed to widespread, chronic health problems associated with Chernobyl exposures.51 UNSCEAR delegates characterized these investigations as “unverified,” “sloppy” with “poor quality control,” and to be “treated with caution.”52 They found that Soviet and post-Soviet research did not adhere to standardized study protocols used in the West. They did not publish in English, the language of international science, and their findings did not match with results from the A-bomb survivor Life Span Study. Fred Mettler and two leading Moscow radiobiologists volunteered to edit the first draft of the UNSCEAR Chernobyl report, a 600-page compendium, which included Ukrainian and Belarusian research investigating the pathways and biological mechanisms for the rising disease rates in the Chernobyl territories. Mettler and his Moscow colleagues, probably Angela Gus’kova and Leonid Ilyin, returned a year later with a 300-page revision that cut out Ukrainian and Belarusian research and highlighted the conclusions of the IAEA assessment: the doses were too low to cause health problems. Psychological damage and economic hardship, they concluded, were the most likely culprits for a rising incidence of disease. Like the IAEA before it, the 1996 UNSCEAR report recommended against follow-up studies for a number of reasons, including the “presumably low level of risk.”53
I elaborate on the inner workings of these UN agencies to spotlight the arsenal of tactics scientific administrators deployed to make the reports of a wide range of health problems in the Chernobyl territories go away. They drew from a well-known toolbox of tactics familiar from controversies surrounding lead, tobacco, and chemical toxins.54 The playbook was rich and varied: classify data, limit questions, stonewall investigations, block funding for research, sponsor rival studies, relate dangers to “natural” risks, draw up study protocols designed to find nothing but catastrophic effects, extrapolate and estimate to produce numbers that hide uncertainties and guesswork, privately slander and threaten dissenting scientists, and cast doubt on known facts so that scientists must pursue expensive and duplicative investigations to prove what is clearly evident. Experts working in the United States had long deployed a similar set of tactics to undermine scientific evidence and survivor testimony about the harmful effects of exposures to low doses of radiation.55
The general strategy behind these tactics was to deny damaging evidence and admit only what could not, in the face of overwhelming evidence, be repudiated. For these reasons, after each new nuclear event—for example, after discovery of leaking, burning radioactive waste in St. Louis in 2010 and after the meltdown of three reactors in Fukushima in 2011—scientific administrators announced that little was known about the health effects of low doses of radiation and they needed to study the problem. The politics of science surrounding Chernobyl shows how people who were paid to produce knowledge generated instead a lasting ignorance.
While international administrators bickered, the number of cancers reported in Belarus and Ukraine doubled and doubled again, reaching the same order of magnitude in eight years as the total number of all cancers ascribed to the atomic bomb explosions in Japan over forty years.56 This was a curious fact after international consultants had estimated that Chernobyl doses were much lower than those that A-bomb victims received, so presumably the number of cancers would be fewer. No one stopped to explain the puzzle. In retrospect it appears that researchers in Ukraine and Belarus were correct; doses people received were greater than the IAEA initially estimated.
Nor were all the thyroid cancers “easily curable,” as IAEA sources attested. The Belarusian mother of Nina Kachan wrote desperate letters to officials in Minsk about her daughter who had a thyroid tumor removed, but the cancer had spread to the girl’s lymph nodes. The family had no money to relocate from their radioactive farm in southern Belarus, and the Belarusian government had no funds either to move the family to safety.57 The international politics of Chernobyl medical investigations were angry, competitive, and jealously guarded, and the children in crowded, poorly lit clinics were lost in the scrum.58
NOW IT IS clear that most of the “foreign experts,” global leaders in radiation medicine, were wrong. In 1996, WHO, UNSCEAR, and IAEA conceded that, seven years after Ukrainian and Belarusian officials announced the problem, the still skyrocketing increases in thyroid cancer in children were due to Chernobyl exposures. Mettler, Wachholz, and other scientists conceded that their models failed them: “There is a major discrepancy,” they wrote, “between estimates of thyroid cancer predicted using dosimetry together with standard risk-projection models and the magnitude of the increase that has actually been seen.”59
So they were late with this recognition. What difference do a few years make? It turns out, a great deal. The denials meant that programs aimed at treatment and screening children were slow to start, and so aggressive cancers were caught too late. The IAEA’s refusal to recognize the epidemic of thyroid cancers also crashed international aid. In 1991, the UN General Assembly had been waiting for the IAEA’s assessment of Chernobyl damage before holding a pledge drive to raise $646 million for a large-scale epidemiological study of Chernobyl health effects and for relocation of over 200,000 people living in areas of high contamination. Coming on the heels of the IAEA’s “no effects” report, the pledge drive netted less than $6 million.60 The big potential donors—the United States, Japan, Germany, and the European Community—begged off, citing the IAEA report as a “factor in their reluctance to pledge.”61 The American delegation, especially, emphasized that in light of the findings of the IAEA’s assessment, population resettlement was unnecessary.62
After the failed pledge drive, the UN Secretary-General created a Secretariat for Chernobyl Relief, but the Secretariat was footballed from agency to agency within the UN, five directors appointed in five years. Chernobyl was a UN hot potato no one wanted.63 Repeated appeals for aid rarely raised more than a million dollars.64 UN officials shrugged and mumbled about “donor fatigue.”65 The IAEA and UNSCEAR’s erroneous insistence that Chernobyl produced no health problems continued to strangle fund-raising. “No conclusive scientific proof of disease from Chernobyl exposure,” a diplomat wrote in 1995, by which time few doubted the thyroid epidemic, “led to a reluctance among the international community to offer decisive and meaningful assistance.”66
If IAEA scientists had reported the unexpected cancers when they learned of them in 1990, advocates would have had more leverage to demand funding for a large-scale study to determine if there were other health problems that specialists in radiation medicine had also neglected to forecast. In 1996, when the IAEA finally recognized the thyroid cancers as a Chernobyl health effect, Angela Merkel, then German minister of the environment, again called for a long-term epidemiological study of Chernobyl effects on a mass scale, equivalent to the A-bomb Life Span Study. No study ensued, again, for lack of funds and a shortfall of leadership.67
From the Chernobyl morass, the IAEA with its UNSCEAR sidekick emerged triumphant.68 These two agencies had long recommended no action on Chernobyl because they identified no problems other than fear and ignorance. The World Health Organization, overtaken by infighting, proved a disappointing leader in the crowded Chernobyl field. In 2003, WHO scientist Keith Baverstock attempted to put together an International Chernobyl Research Board to try again to ask open-ended questions on Chernobyl health impacts.69 Gonzalez preempted Baverstock’s initiative by creating the Chernobyl Forum, an umbrella organization representing seven UN agencies, with the IAEA again at the helm. Instead of a major investigation of health effects, the Chernobyl Forum reviewed investigations in Western literature—most of them repetitive examinations of pediatric thyroid cancer—and issued a “comprehensive report” that ran in the same well-worn track of earlier IAEA/UNSCEAR reports of 1987, 1988, 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2002.70 With an insistent repetition, the Chernobyl Forum blamed the rise of health problems on psychological trauma and called estimates of fatalities in the thousands “exaggerated and incorrect.”
Fred Mettler, the author of the 1991 IAEA assessment and editor of the 1996 UNSCEAR Chernobyl report, also took charge of the Chernobyl Forum report published in 2006.71 Mettler was arguably the single most influential voice in producing judgments of Chernobyl-related health damage that are today cited in the media as fact (fifty-four fatalities and six thousand cases of childhood thyroid cancers). He wasn’t involved in UN politics or the larger skirmishes between pronuclear and antinuclear lobbies and so did not share their political concerns. He was just a university scientist doing his job, which meant focusing on the scientific evidence before him. How did he miss the childhood thyroid cancer epidemic in the 1990s? Why wasn’t he the one to break the news of the unexpected early spike in thyroid cancers to a surprised scientific community? The simple answer is that Mettler didn’t know about them, as he told me over the phone.
But, in fact, he was honest enough to call me back a few days after we first talked to tell me that he had misspoken.
After our conversation in which he refuted the BBC’s claim that he had taken home biopsies of thyroid cancers in Ukraine, he looked at the proceedings of the IAEA’s 1991 meeting in Vienna on the Chernobyl assessment. In the transcripts, he is quoted as saying that he had been given twenty slides, which he delivered to his lab in New Mexico and verified.72 He read me the passage. On the line, we both grew silent for a minute.
“So you forgot about the slides?” I asked.
Mettler replied, “Yes, I suppose I did. It says here that I received them and the lab verified them.”
I then asked, “What else other than radiation could have caused those cancers?”
Mettler answered, “Nothing (pause). It was a mistake.”73
Mettler later disavowed this exchange to a New York Times fact-checker. But after that conversation, other evidence that linked Mettler to those slides and his knowledge of the thyroid cancer came to my attention. First, a Greenpeace memo written about the 1991 conference stated that an endocrinologist in Ukraine, Olga Degtyariova, told Greenpeace staffers about twenty childhood thyroid cancers.74 (Since Degtyariova mentioned twenty thyroid cases, and Mettler verified twenty thyroid biopsies, it seems likely that Degtyariova or someone from her institute gave the twenty slides to Mettler.)75 Degtyariova lost her job as deputy director soon after that.76 Second, Valentina Drozd, the doctor who first recorded thyroid cancers in Belarus, told me that she had spoken at length with Mettler about thyroid cancers during a meeting with the IAEA delegation in Gomel’s run-down Tourist Hotel. She had met Mettler earlier in a village where they were both working. According to Drozd, Mettler recognized her and invited her to sit next to him. Drozd recounted to me that she spoke to Mettler through an interpreter for two hours. She described to him the childhood cancers she had found. The cancers had emerged after just two years, not, as the A-bomb Life Span Study predicted, after ten years. She remembers his reaction as that of a sympathetic listener. “He was very interested,” Drozd recalled, “and I was happy to talk to him.” The next day, Drozd’s boss reprimanded her for violating the chain of command in speaking to Mettler.77 In short, two people took personal risks to convey the news of the thyroid epidemic to Mettler—information Mettler then forgot about.
IT IS NOT surprising that Mettler, like most people, had trouble recovering events thirty years before. Human memory is a wild liar. And that makes oral history a notoriously vexing practice. Subjects asked about events in the past rarely have a precise grasp. The Life Span Study, which is so important to the radiation risk estimates Mettler used, was based on data that had been collected by questioning Japanese survivors five years after the bombing about where they were standing when the blast occurred. Women were asked to give secondhand information on the location of their husbands’ exposures. All this made for a very “messy” situation, as James Neel, a leading geneticist on the project, recognized.78 Scientists are not immune to the same fuzziness of memory.
The problem here is not that Mettler forgot thirty years later about having seen and verified the slides and about having spoken with Drozd. The problem is what he did with that information at the time. First, very soon after he verified them, he noted the twenty thyroid cancers in his IAEA Chernobyl technical report but concluded, illogically, that his teams had found no accident-related health effects, even though, as he admitted to me, nothing but radiation could have caused that spike in thyroid cancers.79 Second, a year later Mettler published a major article about thyroid nodules among children in Chernobyl territories, but he did not mention the twenty thyroid cancers he had verified.80
Such omissions riddled the international drama over Chernobyl health effects. Mettler excised thyroid cancers from his memory just as officials at WHO, UNSCEAR, and IAEA deleted them from scientific journals, press releases, and international assessments. Mettler and his colleagues, who had spent careers in radiation medicine, were evidently unable to suddenly recalibrate their models and acknowledge the evidence that a cancer epidemic could occur so much earlier and at lower doses than they had calculated. For Western radiologists to seriously consider the full range of evidence Soviet doctors presented would have called into question an entire medical infrastructure and wiped out a lifetime of publications and assurances that the public was safe from exposures to fallout from bomb tests, radioactive waste, medical treatments, and daily emissions from neighboring nuclear power plants. The thyroid cancer story might easily have slipped permanently from memory, lost in dismissals of poor Soviet science, had not Olga Degtyariova and Valentina Drozd risked disclosing it, and had not Keith Baverstock gone rogue and persisted in bringing international attention to children crowding into oncology wards.
When I asked Mettler what else might have been overlooked in the Chernobyl medical story—what about the Soviet doctors’ reports of a range of illnesses—he replied that nothing else was possible. “The doses were too low.” He referred me to a host of UNSCEAR documents on the topic. I pulled them out.
They are wonderful to look at. After wading through, as Mettler must have, thick volumes of tables and charts of health statistics generated by Soviet agencies, with confusing, sometimes conflicting data in various calibrations and measurements, the UNSCEAR charts felt like meditation. They were simplicity itself, soothing and lulling; the only thing better than the sunny lucidity of the charts’ risk estimates is the promise of mathematical certainty amid the vast chaos of data that Chernobyl presents. Feed the UNSCEAR charts an estimated dose from one isotope, cesium-137, which itself is a gross generalization, and the charts tell the reader the increased probability of cancer in a given organ. Lost in the risk estimate’s wonderful magic trick of making dozens of other harmful radioactive elements disappear are the bodies that ingested them and an accounting of how they fared. I too wanted to believe in the charts, to dissolve into them and make those sick kids in the contaminated regions go away.