From the network that brought us Game of Thrones, HBO has found another winner with its hit mini-series Chernobyl. The five-episode show, which finished in June, told the story of the 1986 accident at the nuclear-power plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, and those who responded to it. While the dramatization of the tragedy is entertaining and has received rave reviews, the show also repeats various urban myths and exaggerations about the effects of radiation. This misrepresentation risks feeding an inflated fear of nuclear energy, which may have fatal consequences.

Of course, Chernobyl is not a documentary and it is wishful thinking to expect every historical drama on TV to follow the truth to the letter, especially when twisting it just a little makes for a more thrilling story. But there are many instances in this particular drama that take artistic licence to the limit, from wild exaggerations to purely fictional events.

For example, at the end of the first episode, residents of Pripyat gather on a railway bridge to watch the reactor fire on the night of the accident. The ominous black screen at the end of the episode suggests that nobody on the bridge survived. Yet there is no reliable record that this incident ever happened or that these deaths even occurred. Meanwhile, the helicopter crash shown in episode two is a misrepresentation of the truth – although a helicopter did crash several weeks into the core cooling operation, this was because of a collision with a crane rather than due to a noxious cloud of radioactive smoke.

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Chernobyl is magnificent despite its flaws

The scale of the accident in the series is also vastly inflated, from the amount of radiation released to the number of people who were killed. The explosion, which could supposedly have left “much of Europe uninhabitable”, was quoted as being an incredible four megatonnes – a magnitude that would have been impossible given that a nuclear-power station physically cannot explode in the manner of a nuclear bomb.

The exact number of deaths caused by Chernobyl is also conspicuously missing from the programme. Instead, viewers are left with the impression that any characters who do not reappear on screen have inevitably died horrible deaths. In fact, over 80% of first responders survived, while reports by the World Health Organization estimate that the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl over an 80-year lifetime is around 4000 – comparable to the average number of people killed in road crashes every day globally.

Fearing the invisible

The problem with shows like Chernobyl is that they show only the hazards of nuclear energy and none of its advantages. When combined with the repetition of false, sensationalized nuclear-horror stories, is it any wonder people have trouble distinguishing where the line falls between fact and fiction? This misrepresentation of nuclear power is frightening and insidious, and leads to deadly consequences in both the immediate future and the long term.

Indeed, directly after the Chernobyl accident there was a rise in abortions due to fear of the effects of radiation on an unborn child, even in countries far away from the site where the increase in radiation exposure was minimal. Researchers estimate between 50,000 and 200,000 otherwise wanted pregnancies were terminated based on uninformed panic with no real scientific evidence. In Denmark, which saw a marked increase in the number of abortions, terminations were performed for women who had been exposed to an average effective dose of just 17 μSv – less than you would expect to receive from one transatlantic flight.

Even with improvements in nuclear safety and education since 1986, we still see this fear-driven behaviour around radiation today. The overly cautious evacuation after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011 was responsible for more than 1000 deaths, according to a report by the Fukushima Prefecture government, while there have still been no radiation-related fatalities. Studies have now determined that fewer people would have died (from exposure to radiation) if they had been allowed to remain in their homes, instead of being subjected to the stresses and dangers of a large-scale evacuation.

Worryingly, the long-term consequences of the public misunderstanding of radiation may be far more damaging. Nuclear power has the lowest number of deaths per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated – even when compared to renewables. Even taking worst-case scenario figures from accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima into account, nuclear power remains the safest form of energy. Part of this is because nuclear power produces very little carbon dioxide, resulting in fewer deaths from air pollution and the consequences of climate change. The lack of enthusiasm for building more nuclear power stations means we are missing the opportunity to save thousands, if not millions, of lives every year by the reduction of air pollution alone.

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Chernobyl’s legacy and why assessing radiation risk is so difficult

With the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels and meeting ambitious emissions targets becoming ever more urgent, taking the nuclear option off the table might be the worst mistake we could make. But if the fearmongering and misapprehensions around radiation are not addressed, the consequences will be more unnecessarily conservative and overly cautious approaches to nuclear power that stem from fantasy rather than actual science. We have reached a point where serious decisions must be made about the future of our energy supply. Whatever these decisions are regarding nuclear power’s place in the global energy mix, they must be made from a position of understanding, not of uninformed fear.

The exaggerated portrayal of the dangers of radiation may make Chernobyl gripping to watch but the real horror of sensationalized accounts like this is that their potential for fuelling lasting public fear may, in the long run, cause more deaths than the radiation they portray.