Long-term radiation effects: Chernobyl’s lessons for Fukushima
Environment” as a monograph in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
“That publication was a response to the World Health Organization’s Chernobyl Forum in 2006, which explicitly states that they found that the plant and animal communities in Chernobyl were doing incredibly well and have come back better than ever, because of the absence of people,” Mousseau said. “But when you dug into the Chernobyl Forum report to find out what they based this conclusion on, there were no scientific papers to support it.”
The Eastern European compilation published in 2009 ran contrary to that positive assessment, but it lacked elements of scientific rigor in places. “It is the best summary of the papers that have been generated in Eastern Europe, and it’s an important body of work for understanding Chernobyl,” Mousseau said. “But there were some problems — for example, with the lack of statistical treatment. We’re using these studies as a bit of a guide, but trying to do them in a thorough way, better than anyone’s done them before.
“The uniform theme we find from these papers is that, when you look carefully, in a quantitative way, you see numerous biological impacts of low doses of radiation. Not just abundance of animals, but tumors, cataracts, growth suppression.”
As Mousseau and Møller detail in an editorial in the Journal of Health & Pollution, the opportunities to study these sorts of effects in nature are once again slipping away, much as with Chernobyl. “The funding for independent scientists to do basic research in contaminated areas in Fukushima is just not there,” Mousseau said.
— Read more in Timothy Alexander Mousseau and Anders Pape Møller, “Elevated Frequency of Cataracts in Birds from Chernoby,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 7 (30 July 2013): e66939 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066939); Timothy A. Mousseau et al., “Tree rings reveal extent of exposure to ionizing radiation in Scots pine Pinus sylvestris,” Trees (June 2013) (DOI: 10.1007/s00468-013-0891-z); Mousseau and Møller, “Introduction to ‘A Critical Analysis of the Concept of an “Effective Dose” of Radiation’,” Journal of Health and Pollution 3, no. 5 (June 2013); Møller and Mousseau, “Reduced abundance of raptors in radioactively contaminated areas near Chernobyl,” Journal of Ornithology 150, no. 1 (January 2009): 239-246 (DOI: 10.1007/s10336-008-0343-5); and Ismael Galván, Timothy A. Mousseau, and Anders P. Møller, “Bird population declines due to radiation exposure at Chernobyl are stronger in species with pheomelanin-based coloration” Oecologia 165, no. 4 (April 2011): 827-35 (DOI: 10.1007/s00442-010-1860-5)
