The Daily Gamecock – Oct 05 9:17 PM
Professor tells students about studying radiation at site of nuclear disaster
By: Gina Vasselli
A professor shared his experience studying the effects of nuclear radiation on ecology with students Thursday.
Tim Mousseau, a biology professor and the associate dean for research and undergraduate education at USC, shared the results of his research on barn swallows, a small bird, in the area surrounding Chernobyl.
In 1986, a nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, now the Ukraine. The accident caused high-level radiation to spread over a 20-mile radius.
Mousseau studied barn swallows in areas around Chernobyl and tested to see the effects of long-term radiation on the ecosystem. He studied the DNA fingerprints, sperm and breakage of chromosomes in the swallows.
“We found that mutation rates at the DNA level were two to 10 times the mutation rates in control areas, and this was in medium contamination areas,” Mousseau said.
Mousseau’s study was one of the first that studied one animal intensely for the effects of the radiation.
Mousseau said he was surprised at some of the indicators of nuclear radiation that popped up, even when they weren’t looking for them.
He told a story about how the group went looking for barn swallows close to the contamination area and found a barn that had nests for 300 to 600 pairs of barn swallows.
But they found that only five pairs were still using that area for nesting. Because barn swallows return to the same place year after year to nest this suggested to Mousseau that many of the birds had died.
The final results of Mousseau’s studies showed that the survival rate for the swallows in the Chernobyl area was less than 15 percent. In a control area in the Ukraine, the survival rate was 40 percent.
Mousseau had experiences with the contamination that people in the area were exposed to daily.
Mousseau said he tested the fruit and vegetables that a local farmer gave to the group and found that they were contaminated, with the berries and mushrooms being the “hottest.”
“These people are being exposed every day to significantly high doses,” Mousseau said.
People have been allowed to move back into the area because the area seems to be returning to normal Mousseau said.
Mousseau stressed that science does not know the effects of the radiation on the population, including animals and humans, because they have not studied it yet.
“We’ve put no money into it,” Mousseau said. “We need to invest more into this kind of research.”
There is a big difference between slow, long-term exposure, like that at Chernobyl, and the pulse of high-level radiation, as during the explosion of a nuclear bomb, Mousseau said.
Low levels of radiation over a long period of time do not cause a single kind of cancer or mutation but “a whole slew of consequences,” Mousseau said.
Mousseau said that before countries decide to use nuclear power they should invest money into researching the consequences associated with nuclear waste and nuclear power.
