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Fukushima's Biological Legacy
An anonymous reader sends this report from Eurekalert:
Scientists began gathering biological information only a few months after the disastrous 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima power plant in Japan. Results of these studies are now beginning to reveal serious biological effects of the Fukushima radiation on non-human organisms ranging from plants to butterflies to birds. A series of articles summarizing these studies has been published in the Journal of Heredity describing impacts ranging from population declines to genetic damage (abstract 1, abstract 2, abstract 3, abstract 4). Most importantly, these studies supply a baseline for future research on the effects of ionizing radiation exposure to the environment. Common to all of the published studies is the hypothesis that chronic (low-dose) exposure to ionizing radiation results in genetic damage and increased mutation rates in reproductive and non-reproductive cells.
Meanwhile, efforts to restart Japan's nuclear power program are dead in the water.
beautiful blood sucking butterflies.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How soon can we expect Mothra to attack?
Take the pale grass blue butterfly, a species long known to be highly susceptible to environmental impacts, feed it the highest found doses of contaminated leaves in a small area near Fukushima, observe a slight mutation increase, announce a finding. OK, some of the study reports are interesting, too bad the press interprets and takes it to an extreme.
Godzilla is now based on science!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...as long as they studied plants and insects on the Fukushima site itself, including right next to the reactor.
"Yeah, as long as we put the seeds right in this radioactive puddle, we got results."
"What about further away? Like outside of the plant property?"
"Are you nuts? I need funding for my next scary study here!"
There was a major tsunami that washed the shoreline and beyond. I wonder how you actually separate population declines due to the radioactivity from the declines due to the tsunami.
Achille Talon
Hop!
If for somereason all the humans in NY city were to just up and leave there would be a huge biological impact. rats, cats, dogs, birds, trees, and butterflies would be disrupted by lack of food, changes in water, reduction of the temperature island, heated underground spaces, lack of trash. Predators formerly finding the human habitation uninviting would swarm into the area.
Likewise formerly unfit mutants on some species, such as cockroaches in bright colors that were out in the daytime might appear
I'm somewhat skeptical that every observed change in Fukashima is casued by radition, even the new appearance of mutations. the departure of the human population might well be a catalyst as well.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Did it cause anything to grow bigger?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Did the AC submitter read the abstracts? Did they understand them? .."
* The papers on chronic (low-dose rate) exposures focussed on the DNA repair and other healthy mechanisms in the exposed organisms.
* Some of the butterfly exposures were done as high-dose rate simulations in the lab, not env exposures.
* The monkey blood-count study was mentioned in the Eurekalert article, but NOT in any of the *journal* (of heredity) papers that I could see; it has been widely criticized on several bases (improbably-low causative dose and insufficient statistical power).
* Look at the refutations at the bottom of this sensational Guardian article:
http://t.co/LuPJHv2Js9
“Unfortunately yet another paper with insufficient power to distinguish real effects and relevance to human health”
"correlations between the caesium and low blood counts in the Fukushima study were not statistically strong."
"monkeys are about the same as those found in sheep in some parts of the **UK** following the Chernobyl accident, i.e. extremely low
"in terms of damage to the animals themselves. I think it much more likely that the apparently low blood cell counts are caused by something other than radiation"
-- Mike Greaves
Darwin beauty - " increased mutation rates" - organism tries to find one variation that survives.
We will be flooded with posts from mainly americans about:
o how few people died in Fukushima
o how harmless radioactivity/radiation is
o that no one died to fallout in the atomic bombings, as it where air bursts
o that no one died in Nagasaki or Hiroshima 'after' the fallout, as the ground level radiation was neglegtible
o that we have no clue and mix up Bequerels with Sieverts
And then we have the discussion about: cutting corners, it would work if people would adhere to the rules, waste, oh, reprocessing, more waste, no: reprocessing does not cause more waste ... depositing the waste, the waste that does not exist ... oh, and it is impossible to do base load with wind and solar ... erm, wind or solar, and then they finally say: coal,kills more than nuclear, because they mix up mining with power production, then they claim coal ash is more dangerous than nuclear waste ...
Ah, have to see if there is a good movie to night on TV.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Look, I know Beta is laggy, but there's no reason to presume they queue the comment postings.
It can suck all on its own without having to believe they deliberately added more suck.
As soon as Toho Co. Ltd. says it's OK.
I looked up straw man argument on wikipedia and there was a link to the above post. Strange isn't it?
The comment was well reasoned and insightful not inciteful.
Ok Ok.. you are right. Ill buy a clue and take your cue to resent my original misuse, misspelling, and outright abuse of the word queue.
Sensationalism aside, this is actually pretty exciting! This is one of the first real oppritunities to study the effects of high radiation exposure in the wild. Chernobyl really wasn't able to be studied heavily until the collapse of the USSR, at which point many isotopes had signifigantly degraded.
Such studies have very wide ranging implications in the theory of evoloution, paleoentology, etc. Ionizing radiation was a big part of Earth's past and now we can study some of the ways it may have affected life.
"dead in the water" was a pretty unfortunate choice of words, given that the Fukushima problems started with water, continue with leaking / storage problem water, and cause death to things in the water...
Very mature and example of being a good sport.
And I'd add some idiot would even suggest animals could get some superpower from radioactivity.
The guy is basically right. People must find funny other countries make their backyards unusable -- not even for tourism. Hence lots and lots of posts about how nuclear contamination is actually good for your skin.
We've been there before. Does anyone remember the girls contaminated with Radium being called less than respectable?
I don't even have to assume they're paid shills, since some will do evil comments just for the kicks...
Genetic mutation is at the very core of Darwinian evolution. Surely, while many of these mutations will be bad and cause reduced lifespans for the individuals affected, SOME portion of these mutations must surely be positive (random mutation) leading to better survival chances and small hops forward in evolution. Every nuclear "disaster" like this should cause many individuals to die-off prematurely (not affecting evolution at all unless some were quite unique) not have any effect on some individuals, and cause "positive" mutations in some small number of individuals (which might not otherwise have naturally occurred and which will now be passed-on to offspring)
What's the problem as long as this did not affect a significant population of an endangered species?
On the other hand, an idea that can explain anything isn't really scientific. There's no question that evolution by natural selection is a scientific idea, but somehow it gets garbled in translation into an "organism trying to find a variation". In other cases (visible in this discussion) it's seen as benign intelligent force that will compensate for our mistakes. You can purge the white-bearded sky god from your iconography, but it's harder to get him out of your thinking.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Am I on the right website?
cause all those chems were just so much more deadly than the radioactive meltdown of the cores of 4 nuclear power plants and the resultant release of plutonium and cesium that will continue unabated for at least 50 more years?
Ignoring the politics of this discussion for a moment, what we are seeing here is the process of bio-accumulation expressed in nature. These are the radiological effects on small species at the bottom of the foodchain and what we are observing is the amount of time it takes these radionuclides to be moved through the food chain whilst affecting these creatures.
This is because radio isotopes present to a metabolism like a micro-nutrient that can be utilized in the body, for example pu-239 analogues iron so to a metabolism, it is used like iron would be. The creatures that consume it are themselves consumed by their predators.
Once ingested, radiation emitters are move somewhere in the body where that nutrient (analogue) is required. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation is emitted at various energetic levels as the radionuclide decays inside the body. The surrounding tissue absorbs the radiation and the gestation period for cancer, lasting roughly six years in humans, begins as a direct effect of exposure to the radio isotope. The indirect effect is on the genome and the DNA which is what I suspect we are observing now.
The affect of radionuclide contamination on humans is inevitable and the simple fact here is that the longer the radionuclides are release into the environment, the more there will be increasing the effects and variation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Godzilla has to start somehow. They've made it a self fulfilling prophecy with lax safety standards.
The short term death-toll is less of an issue than the long term dietary exposure.
Ironically it is the American denialists that are most likely to exposed via Pacific seafood.
The risk is not one of average exposures but a crapshoot of who gets to be the offspring of the person who ate the fish that ate the wrong mollusk which ate the wrong particle of the wrong isotope.
Americans could limit you exposure by choosing seafood from the west coast. oh wait.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
>> how few people died in Fukushima
Yes, many people died in Fukushima and the coastal region hit by the tsunami. About 20.000 people IIRC. None of those deaths are attributable to the meltdowns or radioactive release that occurred later. What I find disgusting is that you wilfully ignore and abuse the death of so many people to further your unrelated point about nuclear energy. That is as absurd as saying that the people on flight MH17 (shot down by anti-aircraft missle) died because your god does not like gays.
>> how harmless radioactivity/radiation is
It is and it isn't, it all depends on the dose. Here is your test: go outside and stand in the sun for 5 minutes. Nothing bad will happen while you bask in the radiation of that nuclear fusion reactor called the sun. Now do the same for a little longer at a higher elevation (ie on a mountaintop) and you will get a nasty sunburn. Too much exposure to UV will raise your chances of getting skin cancer dramatically, yet we still allow people to expose themselves that much.
>> that no one died to fallout in the atomic bombings, as it where air bursts
>> that no one died in Nagasaki or Hiroshima 'after' the fallout, as the ground level radiation was neglegtible [sic]
You do know that you are conflating two things: bombs meant to kill and destruct, and nuclear power (stations) designed to provide power and thus keep people alive? But as we have arrived at apparently your biggest fear: many more (>1000) atom bombs have been exploded since as tests, and somehow it did not destroy the world. Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your fear of atom bombs and nuclear power, and put it into perspective with the rest of the dangers that threaten humanity: The same as seen in the Fukushima Tsunami: drowning. One of the biggest threats is global warming, leading to an observable rise in sea levels. Nuclear energy may be (not so) dangerous stuff, fossil energy is unfortunately way more dangerous. The choice is between these two, because all renewable energy schemes are not ready.
>> that we have no clue and mix up Bequerels with Sieverts
Yes, that may be the case. Being proud of your ignorance is something I think should be punishable, go stand in the corner with your dunce hat on.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Thank you, I don't expect to get modded up because the debate gets so polarized, there are things that both sides of this debate are uncomfortable about Nuclear Power. A) that it *is* so toxic and B) We have opened pandora's box and there is no closing it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The postulated Godzilla would be better-suited to survive than everything it massacres and would, therefore, be a step forward for evolution. Remember: evolution is an unguided mechanism; it does not care about humans, or cute kittens, or ponies, or venemous snakes... those species best suited survive and evolve as needed while those less-suited to survive die-off. If humans create nuclear disasters which in-turn create an increase in genetic mutation then some of these mutations must (as a consequence of randomness) be positive and if these lead to a superior species arising and wiping-out humanity then this is entirely proper. What could be wrong with it? I acknowledge that many humans have an irrational nearly-religious view of evolution as a "good" process that gave rise to humans and will lead to a bright future of more-evolved humans, but that's NOT written into stone tablets anywhere. If humans are wiped-out by evolution then that is entirely natural and proper even if humans caused the mutations. As evolved animals, everything we do is natural including the creation of nuclear disasters that cause mutations - it's just what we do (and perhaps what we are here to do for our brief moment atop the evolutionary ladder).
Do not fear the gigantic city-stomping lizards, airliner-sized moths with lasers, skyscraper-sized sea sails, etc.... whatever arises will be interesting and exciting and will eventually be replaced by something even more fantastic until the stars die-out and the universe assumes a uniform deep, dark freeze. Everything will end eventually anyway and all the memory of everything that existed will be lost, so there is no point getting attached to any of it, particularly not the fragile, puny little naked bipeds who currently think they run this planet, when in reality they may just be queueing up to be snack for the next owners of the place.