The children of atomic bomb survivors: A genetic study
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
At university I had to do a course in radiation protection and that was the first time when I heard this idea challenged. Especially that we needed to distinguish between teratogenic damage to the unborn during exposure and potential genetic damage passed on to children conceived after exposure. The former was an established fact the later a possibility no one had found proof of.
The article seems not only to corroborate this, but also my impression that these two things are regularly confused.
"Inasmuch as even today the issues are occasionally confused, a clear distinction must be drawn between these studies and studies on the children in utero at the time of the bombings."
That’s one of the problems with assessing the damage from indirect exposure - things like drinking, smoking, lead exposure, asbestos exposure, etc. are bigger irritants.
And control groups are very hard to manage for long term (lifelong) studies.
There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying in Pripyat from radiation exposure: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernob...
If you read the book Voice of Chernobyl (on which the TV series was based), by about half way through it becomes fairly obvious that a lot of the liquidators must have died of radiation related diseases after their service, just from references to "he was the last one of his group to die" etc. However there is a scientific literature, mostly derived from a single Russian Scientist, V. K. Ivanov and his team, that actively works on denying this. The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.) Generally I would treat claims that there was little contamination, and that contamination didn't spread, with scepticism. There was a lot of looting of the closed off areas.
Meanwhile the liquidators themselves are starting to get organised and their estimate is about 200,000 early deaths out of 600,000. Which does line up with the life expectancy chart.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was...
The most recent documentary on Chernobyl using Russian archive footage has a few minutes hinting at significant mutations in children at at the time, but it's hard to know what the details are behind that.
Why not? That there was endemic alcoholism is well known and easily explainable. Not only an entire empire collapsed, but an entire lifeworld. Some of the best Russian testaments as to what happened after the end of the Soviet Union, like Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, place great emphasis on it. I mean look at Yeltsin - he was drunk non-stop, and it almost killed him during his presidency.
Liquidators actually have longer life expectancy than common folk. Compared to the control group (males of same age starting the same year), more of them are alive today (which is mostly explained by the regular health checkups they all get for free so they are less likely to die from long-neglected chronic diseases Slavic men are very prone to). This is true for 3 liquidator groups out of 4 (that is, to everyone who wasn't on the scene during the first night - of those, and that's a very small group of under 700 people, most suffered radiation sickness or trauma and their life expectancy is of course, shorter).
No one of civilians including Pripyat residents, could have suffered any level of radiation damage at all.
It also requires us to believe that there was no widespread looting in the area, which is a claim that turns up in multiple sources, and is consistent with Russian behaviour in the current and past wars.
It requires us to believe that unlike pretty much every other event in Soviet history, Russia has told the complete honest truth about Chernobyl.
On which front, let me just ask - where are the memorials to the victims of Stalin's purges? There has been plenty of time to put a few up since the Soviet Union fell.
This one? [1]
The terrible thing that happened was the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was a humanitarian catastrophe, nearly as much as its existence had been. The life expectancy decline starts in 1989 (when the Soviet economic system starts disintegrating as republics splinter off and declare independence) and then accelerates after 1991, when the USSR dissolves. I'm convinced by the normal explanation offered: the consequences of general economic recession and chaos. This is Russian food production over the same period [2]. Unsurprisingly, life expectancy went down much more in Vladivostok, in far eastern Russia, than it did in Moscow. Moscow did get somewhat irradiated, while Vladivostok did not, but Moscow fared better economically.
Nutrition, healthcare, incomes, access to housing, all significantly worsened in the 1990s for much of Russia compared to under the late Soviet system. (And unsurprisingly, so did alcoholism.)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_male_and_fem...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ag...
Russia is absolutely vast and most people living in Russia were so far from Chernobyl that their radiation burden from the disaster wasn't significant. The wind conditions meant that foreign countries like Poland were hit by more radiation that, say, Moscow or St. Petersburg. Asian cities like Novosibirsk or Vladivostok were absolutely out of range.
But the life expectancy dip was ubiquitous, not concentrated in the areas closest to Chernobyl. IDK how much of it is attributable to alcoholism, but a healthcare system starved of money seems to me a quite likely culprit.
Of course, they also relocated to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, etc.
Chernobyl didn't have much radiation directly radiated, and the residents of Pripyat were relatively promptly evacuated. The Chernobyl impact has been all about fallout. A bunch of Russian soldiers for example who took over Chernobyl 3 month ago and stayed there for a month until retreat, and who did a lot of digging and armor driving without any PPE in one of the most polluted places there - Red Forest - already got acute radiation sickness as a result and the rest will have a lot of problems down the road from all that fallout dust they ingested.
Another example highlighting the fallout - Belarus where the regions most hit by Chernobyl fallout are, ie. Homel and Mogilev, has almost 50% higher cancer rates than Russia and Ukraine (those 2 have pretty close rates between themselves and similar to Belarus patterns of smoking, drinking, nutrition, etc) mostly due to the higher cancer rates in the Homel and Mogilev region. There is also some indications about higher rate of children birth defects and various genetic illnesses there. Those children naturally weren't exposed to Chernobyl's direct radiation, it is its fallout which continues to exist there.
Seems like something Russia wouldn’t really talk about ?
And just for desert - the commander of the Russian forces which invaded and were stationed in Chernobyl has as a result of that operation recently received a high military award for "preventing nuclear terrorism". Looks more than ironic given that it is his soldiers who got ill and poisoned and who retreating stole and took with them a lot of various contaminated/activated hardware which were stored in Chernobyl zone for years.
Maybe it was a gaffe, or even a deliberate sacrifice of a few pawns to justify further measures. Russia has a solid tradition to treat their soldiers lives as disposable s*t. Ordering them to dig trenches in the red forest is so stupid that feels like an experiment.
When the entire planet refused to take the bait, they just stop talking about it. I assume that any ill soldier returning to Russia would be blamed on Ukranians automatically.
Usually the people who like to minimize the impact of things like this are talking about direct radiation exposure vs exposure to fallout materials or things contaminated by fallout.
People seeking to maximize the scare factor will yak about materials found in Vermont milk, etc.
Its obnoxious pedantry.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/biologists-monitoring-crocod...
https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2017/09/29/why-nuclear-plant...
Looking for the tldr
Science doesn't like proving a negative - there may yet be things we don't understand - but all indications so far (80 odd years later) are that genetic mutations from radiation exposure are not passed on.
The media did not come up with this idea on their own. As the linked book chapter clarifies, studies in mice had shown there was cause for concern and the concern was first expressed by scientists.
The Chernobyl disaster was in 1986 and this study was published in 1991, and it is reporting on a large number of studies carried out in the preceding years. So it is reasonable to assume that the issue had not yet been settled at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. As is usually the case, the press and the public take some time to catch on with the scientific consensus, anyway, not to mention that there is no such thing as unanimous scientific consensus.
To put it plainly: the media reported what the scientists were saying. I don't think anyone was trying to "sell" anything to anyone.
He mentioned that his son was adopted, though whether that was by necessity or out of caution I don't know.
Anyway, he lived to an apparently healthy old age.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234265/
under "Views", right-hand column.
Anyone forced to go outside to find drinking water over the first few weeks have pretty poor odds, if the water contains fallout.
it really depends on the choice of warhead and in a worst-case scenario I do get to life for a few more days. But I had previously seen data for a Hiroshima-sized bomb and considered my chance of survival to be quite good. Turns out that yield class isn't really part of the discussion anymore.