The World - News from Dec. 10, 1987

A senior Soviet energy official denied that more people have died from radiation overdoses at the Chernobyl atomic power plant since the world’s worst nuclear accident there last year killed at least 31 people. In a Moscow news conference, Yuri Filimontsev of the Atomic Energy Ministry said that Western media had misinterpreted a Soviet press report saying that 36 accidents, resulting in three deaths, occurred this year at the plant, near Kiev. None of the accidents “had any direct link to the work at the plant and none was connected with radiation,” he said. Two people died in construction mishaps at Slavutich, where a new settlement for Chernobyl workers is being built, Filimontsev said, and a third person drowned in the Dnieper River.