Biological Consequences of Nuclear Disasters: From Chernobyl to Fukushima – Video and transcript
EXTRACTS
[…]
We found that most organisms show significantly increase rates of genetic damage where it’s radioactive, no surprise there. Most, many of the organisms show increased rates of deformities and other kinds of developmental abnormalities again in proportion to the contamination levels, reduced fertilities, shortened lifespans.
[…]
Starting first with Three Mile Island in 1979. Most of us in the room are familiar with that one. And Chernobyl, 1986, 28 years ago and of course Fukushima 2011. So that’s three out of 600. It’s kind of a, I don’t know, any statisticians in the room? What, what’s the probability there? I don’t know if any of you would get on an airplane if there was a 1 in 200 chance of it crashing.
[…]
So, nobody really cared too much when the tritium was contained within the borders of the power plant. But when it, once it starts getting offsite, the potential for it to get into the ground water and to effect drinking water is significant. And there’s also the fact that we know very little about what the potential ecological and environmental health consequences of tritium leaks might be.
[…]
Of course we have no idea what the impacts will be on the marine side. Again very little research is being done there other than to catch a few fish now and then and see how radioactive they are. And a little bit of modeling going on to see where these contaminants might end up. But not a whole lot of investment really.
[…]
Maybe you’ve seen, you know, the video, Radioactive Wolves and, you know, Disney Channel has these kind of Cinderella stories for Chernobyl on a regular basis. And we, but there, when we went to look for it there wasn’t any quantitative scientific data published.
[…]
We’re not so interested in dose because of the way we do our studies but we are interested in knowing if it’s a high, medium or low dose. And so we’ve actually made a lot of progress in this area.
[…]
And the basic answer is that overwhelmingly from, you know, the 50 plus studies that happened on genetic damage is associated with radiation exposure in Chernobyl. It’s, you know, the question is answered. All right, so now that we know that there’s increase mutation rates
[…]
And then
last year they actually were fairly methodical and found 15 cases of these partial albinos in about 70 or 80 barn swallows. So about the same frequency as we see in Chernobyl in the radioactive areas. Fairly strong evidence that, that this is good biomarker for radiation exposure.[…]
But nobody, it had been lost to the world until my colleague Anders discovered it and started applying it to our birds. And sure enough it allows us to get tiny, tiny minute amounts of the material. And we can actually look at the morphology of the sperm. We can look at the behavior of the sperm. And there are large effects on both
[…]
And when we did this we realized again in these Chernobyl areas, dramatically higher levels of tumors. Many of them on the head and around the eyes but also on the chin, here’s another example here. Some strange developmental abnormalities as well again often where the birds are being exposed I suspect. But just strange kinds of growths that are almost never seen in normal populations.
[…]
And found again very striking significant relationship between the frequency of cataracts, the degree of cataract and background radiation but only for females, not in males in this case.
[…]
It turns out neurological tissue is well known to be quite sensitive to the effects of radiation, more sensitive than most other tissues. It had been observed in children in Belarus as well but of course nobody wanted to ascribe radiation as the source of that. But, just
to skip over the statistics. The other thing we learned though is that for a bird, 5 percent decrease in brain size is important.[..]
turns out that in the hotter parts of Chernobyl abundance is depressed by 2/3. There’s on 1/3 as many birds as there should be living in these hot areas. So if you went there you’d still see a few birds. And you might go oh, looks kind of normal. But when you go and count them and you relate this to the radiation and everything else that’s important, very, very strong signal, only 1/3 as many birds, about 1/2 as many species of birds in the area. So big effects on the abundance of biodiversity of birds. But it’s not just birds. Spiders, again very few in the hot areas. Grasshoppers, fewer in the hot
areas. Dragonflies, fewer in the hot areas. Bumblebees are quite sensitive it turns out and missing from the hot areas. Butterflies missing from the hot areas.[…]
Look at the size of this thing. It’s huge. There are wolves inside the zone. But when you look at the entire assemblage of mammals using this technique, many fewer mammals especially the smaller mammals in the hot areas.
[….]
And when we compare the relationship between decline in abundance versus radiation the effect is about twice as strong in Fukushima as we currently see in Chernobyl. And this lead somebody, some journalist who suggests, I didn’t say this but the journalist came up with this all on his own. Good journalist. He’s provided a lot of inspiration. Suggested that maybe this difference was because of adaptation going on in Chernobyl where there’s been, you know, more than 20 generations.
[….]
We found that most organisms show significantly increase rates of genetic damage where it’s radioactive, no surprise there. Most, many of the organisms show increased rates of deformities and other kinds of developmental abnormalities again in proportion to the contamination levels, reduced fertilities, shortened lifespans. I didn’t talk about that but we have data on this. Reduced population sizes and reduced biodiversity in many of these hot areas. Some other more interesting speculative suggestions are that there may be in some groups, there’s some evidence of sort of amplification, magnification of genetic damage because of chronic multigenerational exposure to the radiation.
[…]
We have very little information, almost no information concerning developmental genetic effects in Fukushima. That’s just starting. We have some of the ecological observations, the population sizes but the genetic stuff is just coming in. So we don’t know what’s going on at that level very well. But all of our data is consistent with, it may not be a linear response but there’s certainly no evidence of a threshold response. There’s no evidence that the effect disappears below a certain level. It disappears but it disappears into the noise as it becomes harder and harder to detect any kind of signal given the noise that exists at these lower levels. So sample sizes would need to be larger if we were to really just, you know, attempt to figure out whether that was a some kind of gradual linear response or a threshold response.
But there’s no evidence of a threshold. Certainly we see strong statistically significant signals at the levels of, you know, half a microsievert per hour which was set 4, 5 millisieverts per year. So that’s not really, that’s a pretty low level and we still see detectable effects on most of these things.[…]
And we have an interest in fire issues in this zone, especially with climate change. Because litter has, is where most of the radioactive contaminants are located. And we noticed that the litter area was getting thicker, was quite thick in some of these areas. So we did the experiment. Basically we went and put out our fresh clean dead plant material in little bags, you can see these little bags filled with plant material that we scattered throughout the zone, left for almost a year and then retrieved them after a year of decomposition. And low and behold decomposition rates presumably reflecting the microbial community primarily, also some invertebrates, but mostly the microbial community were dramatically effected and much lower in the hottest parts. Again we weren’t the first to notice this but we were first to do the experiment to demonstrate experimentally in this case, not just a correlation, this was an experimental
manipulation that the microbial community was affected[…]
Published on 17 Jul 2014
Timothy Mousseau discusses the impact of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster on natural populations and the impact of high radiation levels on the Fukushima, Japan, area. One aim of his research is to determine whether or not organisms can adapt to radioactive environments.
Speaker Biography: Timothy Mousseau is a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. He recently served on the National Academy of Sciences committee to examine the incidence of cancer near nuclear power plants.
For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feat…
TITLE: Biological Consequences of Nuclear Disasters: From Chernobyl to Fukushima
SPEAKER: Timothy Mousseau
EVENT DATE: 2014/05/15
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 63 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
Timothy Mousseau discusses the impact of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster on natural populations and the impact of high radiation levels on the Fukushima, Japan, area. One aim of his research is to determine whether or not organisms can adapt to radioactive environments.
Speaker Biography: Timothy Mousseau is a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. He recently served on the National Academy of Sciences committee to examine the incidence of cancer near nuclear power plants.
Full transcript also here ;
>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:24 >> Today's event is organized by Science Technology and Business Division of this Library of Congress. I'm Tomoko Steen, research specialist here at the Library of Congress. Today's speaker, Tim Mousseau, maybe I say Professor Tim Mousseau, currently professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina. He has Ph.D. from McGill University in Canada. And he had served as the Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Vice President for Research and the Graduate Education at the University of South Carolina. And he also was in the Washington area. He was a Program Officer at NSF, National Science Foundation. He serves for the many editorial boards for both domestic and international scientific journals. And he was also on the advisory panel for NSF, USGS and the many other variety of agencies.
And also international grant foundations. He has over 160 publications, probably a lot more now but also 2 published edited books published from the Oxford University Press. And he’s also co-editor of the annual review series, The Year in Evolutionary Biology. I have one copy on Chernobyl in the back there and picture was taken by Professor Mousseau. And that was published from New York Academy of Sciences. Since 1999,
Professor Mousseau has been collaborating with colleagues from CNRS and the University of Paris working on these cases of Chernobyl, especially focusing on the biological effects of radiation, various species, birds, insects and people. And now his focus is Fukushima and comparing his data with Chernobyl to Fukushima. So before further adieu and the all interesting stories waiting for you. And please join me welcoming Professor Mousseau.
Prospective buyer urges community to push for nuclear plant sale
During the shutdown we asked the NRC if they would ever see the reopening of the plant, and they said they have never done it,” Tadisch said. “But the plant is in good shape, and they saw no problem with seeing it run for those 20 years or longer.”
CARLTON — Community action is the next step in RGA Labs’ pursuit of the Kewaunee Nuclear Plant.
The Chicago-based engineering and technology firm presented its case for taking on ownership of the plant, which is just over a year into the decommissioning process.
Robert G. Abboud, president of RGA, said his company approached current owner Dominion Resources Inc. of Richmond, Va., in November 2012 about buying the plant. Abboud and company vice president Ron Chin presented their case Thursday night to 110 community members and elected officials at the Carlton Town Hall.
Dominion has shown no interest in selling the facility. Abboud urged community members to contact legislators and share their views of what they want to see happen with the plant.
“The real power is in the community and the elected officials,” Abboud said. “If it is going to happen, it will because the community demands Dominion relook at this issue, and I think Dominion owes it to them.”
Town of Carlton Supervisor Steve Tadisch said the town is looking into alternatives to shutting the plant down, including the best case scenario of facilitating a sale and generating power again.
March 2011 power loss at Fukushima plant caused by tsunami: regulator
TOKYO, July 18, Kyodo
The power loss at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s No. 1 reactor in March 2011 was triggered by tsunami, Japan’s nuclear regulator said Friday, denying the possibility raised by the Diet’s investigation commission that it could have been caused by the powerful earthquake.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority’s interim report on the 2011 nuclear disaster said the power loss — which led to the failure to cool the reactor and resulted in a meltdown — and damage to equipment occurred as tsunami waves flooded the plant, citing results of its on-site probe.
Panels of the Diet, the government, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the private sector have separately released investigation reports so far, but they differ regarding some issues…. Rest of article behind firewall http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2014/07/302889.html
Global Warming Stops Nuclear power in its tracks!
“”If tidal waves knock out the water pumps you can have a meltdown.”
http://www.fairewinds.org/global-warming-stops-nukes/
July 17th, 2014
Two Turkey Point reactors owned by Florida Power & Light are cooled by water from 168 miles of canals. Due to global warming, and exacerbated by discharge from the reactors, the canals are now overheated, and one degree from the maximum temperature allowed by the NRC. Arnie Gundersen was interviewed by Miami News Radio, which has a news brief.
The reactor could shut down or reduce power, but demand for air conditioning is high. Rather than shutting down, FPL wants to draw 30 million gallons of water a day from an underground aquifer.
In 2011, Arnie talked about another challenge facing Turkey Point due to global warning: sea level rise. Some of Miami is expected be under water before Turkey Point’s licenses expire. “”If tidal waves knock out the water pumps” — as they did at the Fukushima reactor in Japan earlier this year — “you can have a meltdown.”
The Miami Herald covers the current story in more depth. The 2011 story is posted here.
INDOOR Pokemon Playground for All opens in Fukushima for victims of one the “worst nuclear disaster in history “
The project not only involved Pokemon, but also Tsutaya and Yahoo! Japan. Thanks to this collaborative project, an indoor park has been constructed for the kids who have suffered various traumas during the disaster to forget their worries and play. A large Pokemon-themed sandbox can be seen inside the facility for these kids to play in. Pikachu was even present for the facility’s opening.
Published on July 18, 2014, by spartanchef
http://sgcafe.com/2014/07/pokemon-playground-opens-fukushima-victims-2011-earthquake/
In 2011, the entire world witnessed the tragedy which befell Japan as a series of powerful earthquakes and tsunamis rock the country between March and April.
Three years after the tragedy, Nintendo’s popular Pokemon franchise has built the “Playground for All” in one of the worst-hit areas of the disaster, Fukushima, which not only suffered yet another strong earthquake in April 2011, but also experienced one of the worst nuclear disasters in history which has been dubbed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident.
The project not only involved Pokemon, but also Tsutaya and Yahoo! Japan. Thanks to this collaborative project, an indoor park has been constructed for the kids who have suffered various traumas during the disaster to forget their worries and play. A large Pokemon-themed sandbox can be seen inside the facility for these kids to play in. Pikachu was even present for the facility’s opening.
Tsutaya meanwhile has released a special Pokemon T Card which will help give funds to the area and Yahoo! Japan is currently doing an internet fundraising drive to gather funds for the Playground for All Project. The Pokemon With You project, which has helped much in the reconstruction of Iwaki City, Fukushima has visited a temporary housing project for the victims and entertained the kids who have experienced the disaster first hand.
The Playground for All Project aims to not only the children who will be the future of Fukushima prefecture, but also the community which has suffered so much this past few years thanks to the series of disasters they have experienced.
Exelon appeals to New York to keep nuclear plant running for four more years
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/exelon-appeals-to-new-york-to-keep-nuclear-plant-running/287687/
By
Dive Brief:
- Exelon has filed a proposal to New York’s Public Service Commission for a power purchase agreement with a New York utility to keep its R.E. Ginna nuclear plant, which provides up to 581 MW of electricity to New York, running for four more years.
- The plant’s last agreement, with Rochester Gas & Electric Corp, ran out at the end of June of this year. The ten-year contract was not renewed.
- Since 2011, the plant has lost more than $100 million, mainly to operating costs and poor performance in the state’s wholesale power markets. Currently the plant is entirely dependent on wholesale market performance.
Dive Insight:
R.E. Ginna does not suffer from the same issues some other plants do: It has license to keep running until 2029, which means it has yet to age out of operation. Further, the New York Independent System Operator has calculated that the plant needs to stay open and running for at least three years, until October 2018. Planned construction of new transmission lines and a new substation in the Rochester area of the state should be completed by then, which will guarantee a reliable supply of electricity to the region.
If the plant closes, the state could have another problem. New York belongs to the Northeast Greenhouse Gas Market, which follows a cap-and-trade protocol allowing states to pay to buy and sell each others’ carbon emissions in order to bring them down overall. If the plant closes, then prices of carbon emissions from New York will rise as more carbon, produced from natural gas generation that would need to replace the plant’s output, will be emitted. That could have a knock-on effect for rate payers.
In Illinois, three of Exelon’s six nuclear plants are in danger of closing for much the same reasons as R.E. Ginna: A lack of money to keep operating. However, last week Exelon said it had “no plans” to close the plants any time soon, seeing the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to reduce carbon emissions as a possible advantage.
Ageing nuclear systems increase accident risk globally – Oxford Analytica Ltd
( Behind firewall) https://www.oxan.com/display.aspx?ItemID=DB192027&StoryDate=20140718
The Oxford Analytica Daily Brief ® – Friday, July 18 2014
Nuclear weapons are complex devices with enormous explosive force. The means by which nuclear weapons can be delivered — aircraft and long-range missiles — are also highly complex feats of engineering and require sophisticated maintenance to keep in working order. Invented 70 years ago, nuclear weapons are now in the possession of at least nine countries (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea). During the height of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union possessed over 70,000 nuclear weapons; many of them now pose significant accident risks.
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