Hello and welcome to More or Less, I'm Charlotte McDonald.

Last week on the podcast, we were inspired by the new TV miniseries Chernobyl.

We looked at the difficulties of working out the numbers of people who died due to the

disaster at the nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986.

There was nothing sane about Chernobyl.

The number of people who died from extreme radiation at the site in the immediate aftermath

of the reactor exploding stands at around 31.

That's reasonably uncontroversial.

But what's much harder to work out is how many people died subsequently.

How many people's lives were shortened by cancers caused by the radiation that spread across

Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and across Europe.

By the end of our last podcast, this was the best guess of the figure by our expert Professor

Jim Smith of Port Smith University in the UK.

The best estimate I've seen is up to 2065 is about 15,000 fatal cancers.

15,000 is obviously a lot of people and the TV show goes a long way to depict the enormous

repercussions and challenges faced by the Soviet authorities in the aftermath of the explosion,

the efforts to secure the plant and clean up the surrounding contamination.

And today we want to take a look at other forms of power generation to see just how deadly

nuclear power is in comparison.

The major energy sources saw the account for 98% of our energy production is from coal,

there's oil, there's biomass and there's gas.

This is Dr. Hannah Vitchy, a researcher at the University of Oxford.

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