![]() ![]() Steam started to build in the cooling pipes, causing a power surge the plant’s engineers couldn’t shut down. Despite the delay, communication and safety protocols lapsed, and, the cooling core was kept offline. The reactor and its emergency cooling core had been shut down the day before for routine maintenance and tests. ![]() Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was in trouble. Shortly after midnight on April 26, 1986, a nuclear power plant 2 miles from the city of Pripyat, in what was then the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), started to malfunction. What happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant? With ongoing threats to staff and residents around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and 440 active nuclear reactors around the globe, it’s crucial to understand the long-term, and generational effects, of ionizing radiation. Rather, these studies are a bid to better understand how genetic material may be changed by radiation - and how exposure manifests in the genetics of future generations, too. The reason why the scientists are looking again at the fallout from the explosion today is not out of morbid curiosity. In one study, researchers based in the United States and Ukraine looked at genetic mutations in the children of people who had been exposed to radiation in the other, scientists evaluated the genomic profile of cancerous tumors removed from people exposed to the blast’s radiation. Today, two studies show how the accident’s effects continue to manifest in ripples of illness and death. In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident killed two workers at the plant immediately, and in the following days and weeks, the fatalities rose. “I think this should be reassuring data that there’s a lack of evidence for substantial or significant transgenerational effects.”ĭr Alex Cagan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, said: “While these findings do not diminish the innumerable personal tragedies associated with the Chernobyl nuclear accident they do provide a glimmer of hope that the potentially damaging effects to DNA do not appear to have been passed down to the children of those involved.The fallout from Chernobyl is both vast and ongoing. “These mutations may be in the parents’ blood, but we’re not seeing this horrific science-fiction-like mutation of sperm and eggs,” said Chanock. ![]() All of the children were conceived after the accident.Įven though their parents had been exposed to high levels of radiation, there was no increase in the number of new mutations – those not detected in either parent but that could have arisen because of damage to their eggs or sperm – in these children. To investigate this possibility, Chanock and his colleagues analysed the genomes of 130 children born to parents who were either involved in the cleanup of the Chernobyl site after the accident, or were evacuated from nearby towns and settlements, as well the parents’ genomes. In theory, mutations in these cells could be transmitted down the generations, potentially triggering developmental disorders or cancers in the descendents of radiation-exposed individuals. ![]() “There’s this science-fiction societal view of three-headed babies, which is really accentuated in the Fukushima setting right now.”Īlthough ionising radiation can damage DNA in the cells of people exposed to it, potentially their risk of cancer, it was less clear whether egg and sperm cells were similarly affected. “There’s a lot of reticence among people to go back, and one of the major concerns is the transgenerational effects,” said Dr Stephen Chanock, of the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, who supervised the research. As well as providing fresh insights into how radiation affects the human body, the findings should help reassure other people who may have been exposed to radiation, such as those living near the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011, that it is safe to return home or have children. ![]()
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