Fallout from Chernobyl

In 1992 the nuclear industry celebrated.  It was its fiftieth anniversary and a report on the accident at Chernobyl claimed no evidence of health effects, six years after the explosion.

 Within months, another team from the West presented a very different picture.  The team was led by two British scientists, Dr Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organisation and Professor Sir Dillwyn Williams of Cambridge University.  Their findings appeared to confirm reports from local doctors of an epidemic of thyroid cancer - a disease so rare in children they believed it must be linked to the accident.

 But powerful interests opposed this unexpected discovery. TV6 tells the story of the battle by Baverstock and Williams to overcome prejudice and rewrite the textbooks with a finding which has grave implications for the nuclear industry worldwide.  Now ten years after the accident, these results stand as the first confirmed effect of the fall-out. But they’re unlikely to be the last; local doctors are already reporting a range of other health effects which they suspect are linked to Chernobyl...