On Friday, April 13, 2012 9:42:23 AM UTC+1, Nightjar wrote:
On 13/04/2012 08:15, harry wrote:
snip

Nearly a million people have died soon due to cancer according to
some.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernob...he_Environment

Wikipedia is only slightly better than indymedia as a source, as it
relies upon collective opinion, rather than provable fact. ISTR a
well-known personality who tried to correct their own date of birth
several times, before giving up, as so many other people 'knew' better
and kept changing it back to the wrong date.

In fact it looks as if harry is shooting himself in the foot with this one - reading the wikipedia article I get the impression that the book it describes (which is the one where the statistic comes from) has been positively reviewed by those with an anti-nuclear axe to grind, and highly critically by everyone else...
For example, the quote from one reviewer "The value of this review is not zero, but negative, as its bias is obvious only to specialists, while inexperienced readers may well be put into deep error. ... Yablokov's assessment for the mortality from Chernobyl fallout of about one million ... puts this book in a range of rather science fiction than science"