The Sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor number 4 in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on Jan. 25, 2006. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Widely held beliefs include that hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people died from radiation-induced cancer; ecosystems were ravaged; and territories left uninhabitable for millennia.
April 26 marked the 40th anniversary of the disaster. Several experts, as well as the French Association for Scientific Information, an organization backed by Nobel-laureate scientists, caution that public memory of the disaster has been shaped less by epidemiological evidence than by a long-running narrative effort sustained by ideological and economic interests.
