Effects of the Chernobyl disaster children of liquidators conceived after the accident, when compared to their siblings that were conceived before. However, this effect has diminished sharply over time. Soviet authorities started evacuating people from the area around Chernobyl only on the second day after the disaster (after about 36 hours). By May 1986, about a month later, all those living within a radius of the plant (about 116,000 people) had been relocated. This area is often referred to as the zone of alienation. However, significant radiation affected the environment over a much wider scale than this 30 km radius encloses. According to reports from
Effects of the Chernobyl disaster than the figure of 4,000 in the IAEA press release; warned that predictions of excess cancer deaths strongly depend on the risk factor used; and predicted excess cases of thyroid cancer range between 18,000 and 66,000 in Belarus alone depending on the risk projection model. However, elevated incidence thyroid cancer is still seen among Ukrainians who were exposed to radioactivity due to Chernobyl accident during their childhood, but who were diagnosed the malignancy as adults. Another study claims possible heightened mortality in Sweden. Greenpeace quoted a 1998 WHO study, which counted 212 dead from only 72,000 liquidators. The environmental NGO