Nuclear accidentsLong-term radiation effects: Chernobyl’s lessons for Fukushima

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster spread significant radioactive contamination over more than 3,500 square miles of the Japanese mainland in the spring of 2011. Now several recently published studies of Chernobyl, directed by Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Møller of the Université Paris-Sud, are bringing a new focus on just how extensive the long-term effects on Japanese wildlife might be.

A University of South Carolina release reports that their work underscores the idea that, in the wake of the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, there have been many lost opportunities to better understand the effects of radiation on life, particularly in nature rather than the laboratory. The researchers fear that the history of lost opportunities is largely being replayed in Fukushima.

Given the widespread interest in using nuclear power as a means of generating energy with minimal carbon emissions, the authors believe policy-makers — and not just in Japan — need better to fund independent scientists wanting to study the after-effects of Fukushima.

Mousseau and Møller have with their collaborators just published three studies detailing the effects of ionizing radiation on pine trees and birds in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. “When you look for these effects, you find them,” said Mousseau, a biologist in USC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

In the journal Mutation Research, they showed that birds in Chernobyl had high frequencies of albino feathering and tumors. In PLoS ONE, they demonstrated that birds there had significant rates of cataracts, which likely impacted their fitness in the wild. In the journal Trees, they showed that tree growth was suppressed by radiation near Chernobyl, particularly in smaller trees, even decades after the original accident.

Given previous work by scientists in former Soviet bloc nations, the results were not unexpected to Mousseau and Møller. “There’s extensive literature from Eastern Europe about the effects of the release of radionuclides in Chernobyl,” Mousseau said. “Unfortunately, very little of it was translated into English, and many of the papers — which were printed on paper, not centrally stored, and never digitized — became very hard to find because many of the publishers went belly up in the 1990s with the economic recession that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.”

The release notes that a large body of this work finally came to the attention of Western scientists in 2009 with the publication of “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the