The United Nations report, which found that only 56 people have so far died and 4,000 may eventually perish from the effects of the disaster, was being discussed at a two-day conference in Vienna sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"Their goal is to push for development of nuclear energy," said Oleksiy Pasyuk, of the environmental group Ukraine National Ecology Center. "They want to lower distrust of nuclear energy."

"We are worried that they are suggesting allowing people to once again live in the affected areas," Pasyuk told AFP.

The report said that, aside from a 30-kilometer zone immediately surrounding the reactor that exploded in 1986 and several closed forests and bodies of water, radiation levels have normalized in many place that today are still widely considered dangerous.

Volodymyr Usatenko, who advises a parliamentary commission on nuclear safety, likewise dismissed many of the report's findings.

"The report is based on absolutely false figures," he told AFP. "It is based on official data, on data from a government that never felt responsible."

The UN report, which was being discussed by nuclear, health and development experts in Vienna, concludes that out of more than 600,000 people who suffered the most exposure from the accident -- reactor staff, emergency and recovery personnel in 1986-87 and residents of the nearby areas -- an estimated 3,940 are expected to die from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia.

Chernobyl's number-four reactor, in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine, exploded on April 26, 1986, sending a radioactive cloud across Europe.

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