Richard D North.

What happened next? As news of the accident filtered out to the people who ran the Chernobyl plant and its satellite town, and – simultaneously – to Kiev and Moscow, the first problem was that the senior managers of the plant either did not grasp or could not bare to reveal the full extent of the disaster. Read more...

It is surprisingly hard to allocate blame for the Chernobyl accident. Within the soviet system, nuclear power stations could only have been designed by an ambitious and secretive scientific elite working with an ambitious and secretive technological elite to deliver the national ambitions they all shared and which were guided by a political elite who had complete power to advance a person to giddy heights, or consign them to outer darkness. Read more...

To a surprising degree, it suited many parties - governments, journalists, and campaigners - to exaggerate the consequences of Chernobyl, and then to blame them on the Soviet regime. Read more...

From the start, Western governments were keen to accept the Soviet account of the causes and consequences of the accident, and to agree that the Soviets had done their best in the face of it. Blame was not politic. Read more...

Here's a timeline list of some of the most authoritative accounts of the effects of the Chernobyl accident. If you'd rather something cripser, try the World Nuclear Association's sharp and well-referenced account.  Read more...

The case against six protestors collapsed today in the wake of an extraordinary saga involving an erstwhile undercover policeman. Even now, early in the story's unfolding, it is worth saying that in principle the police are probably right to operate undercover amongst protestors, even at considerable expense. Read more...

Some people promote and millions believe the idea of a very high number for Chernobyl's cancer death toll. (See the 100,000 figure promoted by some Greens, and that's almost moderate.) Some others also adduce huge and horrible birth defects and other health effects.  Assessing the cancer toll, and the wider health effects, is complicated....... Read more...

I won't rehash my previous arguments about protest: you can find them here easily in the "handling protest" category. Now's the time to redefine the right to protest. Read more...

This was a note written by Paul Seaman (www.paulseaman.com) as a July 2006  account by the BBC's leading science programme of the different ways of thinking about and accounting for the death-doll from cancer caused by radiation. It helps show why different experts come to very different predictions of the scale of, for instance, the Chernobyl disaster. Trouble is (for those who'd like a simple life) it debunks "LNT" which is the underpinning theory of the low estimates of people like the Chernobyl Forum, and does so by arguing that these are way too high. Read more...

Stephen Fry has visited the coastline and the waters of the US's Gulf of Mexico and declared them to be, well, what? The victims of a spill, obviously. Maybe even the victim of the clean-up, for all we know. But not, he feels, the victim of any obvious post-accident wickedness or folly on BP's part. That was, I think, the take-away message of Stephen Fry and the Great American Oil Spill (BBC2, 7 November 2010). But the interest of the programme is not limited to Fry's being fairly sensible. Read more...