241Americium) still persist in the environment even hundreds of kilometers from Chernobyl. Although many radionuclides, such as 131Iodine, either dissipated or decayed within days, 137Caesium ( 137Cs), 90Strontium ( 90Sr) and 239Plutonium ( 239Pu, and other trans-uranium-elements) and their decay products (e.g. The pattern of contamination is heterogeneous, owing to atmospheric conditions at the time of the accident ( Fig. The radioactive contaminants released by the Chernobyl accident were subsequently deposited in surrounding areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, but also elsewhere across Europe 2, and even Asia and North America. The Chernobyl explosion and subsequent nuclear fire, which burned for ten days, led to the release of between 9.35 × 10 3 and 1.25 × 10 4 petabecquerel (PBq) of radionuclides into the atmosphere 1. The only other “Level 7” event, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, took place in 2011 in Japan as a consequence of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It is one of only two events ever to be classified as “Level 7 (major accident)”, the highest possible level on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale – a classification system used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to communicate safety information related to nuclear accidents.

The Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986 is considered the worst nuclear accident in history.

The surprisingly high mean effect size suggests a strong impact of radioactive contamination on individual fitness in current and future generations, with potentially significant population-level consequences, even beyond the area contaminated with radioactive material. Effect size did not decrease over time, providing no evidence for an improvement in environmental conditions. Humans were shown to have intermediate sensitivity of mutations to radiation compared to other species. The effect of radiation on mutations varied among taxa, with plants showing a larger effect than animals. Indirect tests did not provide any evidence of publication bias. Fail-safe calculations reflecting the number of unpublished null results needed to eliminate this average effect size showed the extreme robustness of this finding (Rosenberg's method: 4135 at p = 0.05). Overall effect size of radiation on mutation rates estimated as Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient was very large ( E = 0.67 95% confidence intervals (CI) 0.59 to 0.73), accounting for 44.3% of the total variance in an unstructured random-effects model. In this paper we use a meta-analysis to examine the relationship between radiation and mutation rates in Chernobyl across 45 published studies, covering 30 species.

Mutations radiation chernobyl aftermath