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Low-Level Radiation May be Mutagenic
The Night Watchman writes: "According to article on BBC news, scientists have determined that low doses of radiation can indeed cause alterations in human DNA that are then passed down to future generations. Apparently there was an 'unexpectedly high increase' in genetic mutuations in children born in the area after the Chernobyl disaster." This may shake up the scientific community, which has relied on studies of Hiroshima survivors to evaluate the long-term consequences of radiation exposure.
As a former Reactor Physics Engineer at a UK powerstation I get very irritated by the BBC's irresponsible anti-nuclear scaremongering.
Nowhere on the article are the actual doses quoted. People who cleaned up Chernobly are not or were not exposed to "low levels of radiation" or "low radation doses" by Western standards. They were fried.
In this country the legal annual dose limit is 30 mSv (30 millisieverts) with a much smaller percentage allowable internal dose. The actual dosage to the most exposed workers at the Sellafield reprocessing plant is in the 10-15 mSv range per year, lower than the 20+ mSv ailine cabine crew recieve.
I wish someone would post the actual doses here, whether external or internal, lifetime dose, dose rate, natural background etc.
The BBC loves to stir up the publics' fear of nuclear power and reinforces their ignorance with their own biased tabloid style journalism.
If you want to find out the facts about radiation doses, medical effects, and radiological protection, visit the NRPB website:
http://www.nrpb.gov.uk/
Rant mode off.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
If you are concerned about radiation, you should support nuclear power. Coal fired power plants release much more radiation, in the form of Uranium and Thorium, into the environment than nuclear power plants. That doesn't include all of the other nasty stuff that is produced by burning coal.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Back in 1992, there were two programs running at Argonne National Labs, near Chicago. The first was a fail-safe nuclear plant. It used liquid lithium as the transfer medium, with a gravity fed tank. The lithium protects against leaks, you can't cause a meltdown and when it retires, the reactor seals itself in. The second was a reactor that "burned" long half-life radioactive material and reduced it all to 50 year or less half-life material. That is MUCH easier to store, not requiring million year storage.
What happened to both programs? The Clinton administration killed both of them, supposedly at Al Gore's insistence. I was asked to refute the VP's evidence. In one word, his reasoning was crap. Working prototypes of both reactors existed, they performed as advertised and were truly safe. But they were "nuclear" so Al Gore wanted them killed. Pure lip-service environmentalism. I was there, I performed the analysis, I reviewed the documentation.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The /. article title: Low-Level Radiation May be Mutagenic is pretty misleading. The article concerned a study of people who cleaned up after Chernobyl. I wouldn't exactly call that "low level radiation". The focus of the study was to see if somatic DNA was being affected by the radiation, making the offspring of the cleanup crew have a greater rate of mutation than normal. The study results were pretty scary, but this is not something that was unknown.
Enigma
Enigma
This is the important bit:
"These results indicate that low doses of radiation can induce multiple changes in human germline DNA."
Mammals (including humans) have 'special' cells that have very low degradation in DNA. Normal cells are mutated all the time. This is not a problem as the DNA can take an enormous amount of mutations without changing its function (in fact, in a gene every third base can pretty much be changed at random without the gene product changing one bit). So, you don't want to make new organisms out of skin cells. Therefore the germline cells are there, packed with chemicals that prevent mutations (antioxidants for instance). Most of this is to *prevent* mutations that occur through malicious chemicals. Radiation doesn't really work that way. It will just penetrate through and nock of some basepares from the DNA. Remember: once a basepair is changed, the cell can never again figure out what the correct base was! Anyway, if you are exposed to a large amount of radiation, it can only be expected that the germline is effected as well.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I've spent 4 years working in reactor chemistry, and over the 4 years have recieved 492 mrem of ionizing radiation exposure. When you train in a nuclear frield (I did with the US Navy) they basically tell you that small somatic doses of radiation are practically harmless. The real danger lies in a large chronic dose. We were always told that once a cell was radiated, for things could occur. The cell could have a good daughter, a bad daughter, a dead daughter, or no daughter. One of those things is not like the others, it's the bad daughter. It's cancer. Statistically if you are exposed to 1000 mrem (with data collected from Chernobyl) you increase your risk of cancer 0.06%. I would be curious to see if scientits will say is a dose that could change your DNA.