Political reactions to the Chernobyl accident slowed or stopped many nuclear programs, indirectly contributing to an increase in pollution.

Public reactions to the Chernobyl accident halted the development of nuclear energy in several countries for 15-20 years or more, increasing the use of polluting fossil fuels.

Following the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union (April 26th, 1986), public opinion turned against nuclear energy in many countries. [1][2]

The accident at reactor 2 of Three Mile Island in the USA in 1979 had already sown doubts about the technology, despite zero health impacts and a very low environmental impact. Seven years later, Chernobyl occurred and challenged nuclear programs everywhere, but especially in Europe, which was directly affected by radioactive fallout.

In the months following the accident, driven by a more hostile public opinion, several European countries’ nuclear ambitions slowed to a halt.

Countries such as the Netherlands, Brazil, the Philippines, or Yugoslavia stopped their nuclear projects in the wake of the accident and the hardening of public opinion that followed.[3]

Faced with the revelation of real Soviet lies, but also with the claims or rumors of catastrophic health effects that were spread by the media, often wishing to create a spectacle, many citizens lost confidence in the assurances of their leaders, and it became politically difficult to support nuclear energy. It is, above all, this loss of confidence that plagued the fate of nuclear energy following Chernobyl.

In September 1986, IAEA Director General Hans Blix recalled that after the opposition to nuclear energy following the TMI accident in 1979,

“Gradually public confidence came back in many countries and we could see in March of this year how some countries in Europe — Finland and the Netherlands — were on the verge of deciding in favour of new nuclear power plants. We also were proud to be able to say that 3800 reactor years of experience had been accumulated without a single fatal radiation accident at a commercial nuclear power plant being reported and that there had never been an accident with large-scale radioactive releases from such plants into the atmosphere. The situation is now drastically changed,”

because Chernobyl showed that a civil accident can have very severe consequences on human health and the environment.

But the lack of nuclear energy also has negative consequences. We can calculate [5] that the use of fossil fuels to replace the "lost" nuclear energy from 1986 to 1996 may have increased annual CO2 emissions from ~97 million to 240 million metric tons of CO2 per year for the 1996-2006 period [6],thus aggravating global warming.