It would be interesting to do a survey in Eastern Europe countries of the effect of eating 'too hot to eat' stuff for a generation.

Because, I can assure you, nothing of that kind has ever been done here. And we are much, much, closer.

In fact, I do remember that summer being known for extreme abundance of wild mushrooms. People happily picked them.

My country has its share of public health problems, but I am not aware of an obvious radioactivity-induced signal.

>And we are much, much, closer.

The fallout does not necessarily fall er, out closer to the plant. It depends on weather, which way the winds blew and where it happened to rain.

That said, you may by all means be right that the fears from what actually happened was too high. You may also be wrong, it's hard to tell.

But that is actually not relevant to the point. We know that actual Chernobyl caused expensive countermeasures to be deployed in a very large area for a long time because there was a measurable reason to do so.

The important thing to consider here is not how bad it actually was, but how bad it could have been.

If the plant had burned for months instead of days, it would have been so bad that any discussion about nuclear power today would only be done as satire.

Yes, it is true, the weather at that time did that big loop thing, taking the bad stuff up to Scandinavia and then eventually looping it back.

Still, some stuff clearly came here, the mushrooms appreciated it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to figure out what was the real impact.

You are correct, things could have been much worse. On the other hand, also as a result of Chernobyl, anything similar is nowadays much less likely.

At the end, it is always a tradeoff. Germany and others turning off their nuclear power stations got themselves in quite an energetic problem. Especially nowadays with all the wars and their consequences.