It stands brooding against the skyline, slowly emitting its deadly poison. Twenty years after one of its reactor’s exploded causing the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the plant at Chernobyl in the Ukraine still silently smolders.

It was in the early morning of the 26 April 1986, that the disaster happened, emitting radiation 400 times that released by the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. But it was not until 36 hours later that the local population was evacuated. They, like many others, still suffer the effects of that terrible day.  The plume of radiation would later spread across much of Northern Europe, contaminating hundreds of thousands of people and vast swathes of land.

We still do not know the full health effects of the disaster. Twenty years later, the number of casualties remains a hotly debated topic. Nuclear industry proponents argue that the health effects have been minimal. The  supposed green guru, James Lovelock, says that no more than seventy five people have died because of the disaster .

This month’s respected National Geographic magazine talked of a “cancer fuse” slowly burning in the local population. “Genetic damage done twenty years ago is slowly taking its toll” said the magazine.

But how big a toll? The website – www.chernobyl.org, which documents the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, argues that there “is a consensus that at least 1800 children and adolescents in the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus have contracted cancer of the thyroid because of the disaster. It is feared that the number of thyroid cancer cases among people who were children and adolescents when the accident happened will reach 8000 in the coming decades”.

In contrast, in September last year the Chernobyl Forum published a report written by specialists from seven UN organisations that concluded the disaster will claim approximately 4000 lives. However it has been criticized for downplaying the effects of the disaster .

This month, the international environmental group, Greenpeace, challenged the Forum’s findings.  In a new report written by over 50 respected scientists, Greenpeace argued that “the full consequences of the Chernobyl disaster could top a quarter of a million cancer cases and nearly 100,000 fatal cancers”. 

 Greenpeace also concluded that on the basis of demographic data, 60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus could reach another 140,000 .

We just do not know how many people will die from the disaster. At an international conference in Hiroshima in early 2002, tumour specialists expressed the fear that a variety of cancers could emerge up to 30 years after the accident. Jacov Kenigsberg, the chair of the National Commission of Radiation Protection of Belarus, says simply: “We can say that we’re on the beginning of the road”.

Away from the direct impacts, there are the psychological scars of the disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. Whole families of “Chernobyl’s children” have grown up knowing they can never return home. Children at the time of that accident have now become mothers – and are said to be traumatized in case their babies are born with deformities.  Alcoholism and depression are rife.

Twenty years on, the original structure – called the sarcophagus - built over the reactor after the disaster to stop the radiation is beginning to fail badly. It was only meant to last twenty years, and that time has run out. After years of wrangling a new structure is being built at a cost of $800 million to entomb the sarcophagus. The race is on to complete it before the sarcophagus fails, causing a disaster as equally serious as the first one. Radiation levels inside the building are still so high that workers can only work for shifts of 15 minutes every 24 hours.

For twenty years, Chernobyl effectively stopped the nuclear industry in its tracks. No nuclear plants were built in Europe or America. But now the industry is making a comeback. The two main reasons are concerns in both Europe and America over energy security and the growing international concern over climate change. Unlike fossil fuels – oil and gas – nuclear power is said to produce little carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

 The nuclear lobby is using these two issues – climate change – and energy security- to push its case. If you log on to the website of the trade body for the civil nuclear industry in the UK, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), a banner headline reads: “Nuclear: Climate Friendly Energy”.  Similarly, if you look at the International Nuclear Forum Website is says: “Nuclear energy is a necessary technology to help prevent climate change. Nuclear is part of the solution”.

So the message has changed: Nuclear is no longer about Chernobyl, and its deadly legacy of cancer wards clustered with scared people. Nuclear is no longer worries about waste and fears over terrorism. Nuclear is a “solution”. Nuclear is “the future”.

The second life-line thrown to the industry is energy security. The nuclear industry is promoting itself as a secure panacea to the problem of dwindling energy supply. Another group in the UK, the Supporters of Nuclear Energy talks about the “looming energy crisis” and asks the question “what will happen when the lights go out?” The lights of course will not go out, they argue, if we build more nuclear power plants.

 One person who is enthusiastic about nuclear as a solution to energy security is President Bush, who is leading a “nuclear renaissance” in the US. Bush argues that "a secure energy future for America must include more nuclear power," . Last year Congress passed an Energy Bill that includes up to six billion dollars of subsidies for those building nuclear plants, and 1.25 billion dollars for an experimental new type of nuclear reactor. “Our goal is to start the construction of new nuclear power plants by the end of this decade”, says Bush .

 In the UK, the government has just finished a public consultation exercise as part of a wide ranging review on energy. Although no official decision on nuclear has been made, it is widely known that Prime Minister Tony Blair is in favour of a new generation of nuclear power plants. Indeed one government insider says that two months before the government announced its review, Blair convened a secret meeting to give the green light to nuclear. So the decision has already been made.

But the nuclear rush is not confined to Europe and the US. India is in the process of constructing fifteen nuclear plants. China is also said to have “ambitious” nuclear plans. So too is of course, Iran. It is here we come to the crux of the issue. There are many problems with nuclear power. There are the issues of safety, and cost and the huge issue about what to do with radioactive waste.

But all these, nuclear proponents argue, are surmountable. There are plans for cheaper and safer plants that produce less waste. But that still does not get away from the fact that there is an inherent link between civil nuclear power and its military usage: nuclear weapons. As I have written before:  “Every country that has developed a nuclear weapons programme has done so from a civil nuclear programme.”

Iran is said to be developing “two parallel nuclear programs”: A civil nuclear programme as well as a military programme controlled by its Revolutionary Guards. America is now trying to stop both programmes, just at the same time as Iran is developing the technology at rapid speed. We know the situation is getting critical.

Earlier this month, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran declared that “Iran has joined the nuclear club” . Days later the veteran American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker Magazine, highlighted how America was preparing a military nuclear strike against Iran.  “The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack,” wrote Hersh .

The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has warned that any US military strike on Iran would spark a “dangerous explosive blaze” in the Middle East . Twenty years after one dangerous blaze – Chernobyl – caused such suffering, we have to make sure that America does not attack Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Because if it does, the fire that it would light would probably not be so easily extinguished as the one still burning at Chernobyl. And that one is still not out.