The Soviet nuclear power authorities presented their initial accident report to an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna, Austria, in August 1986.Īfter the accident, officials closed off the area within 30 kilometers (18 miles) of the plant, except for persons with official business at the plant and those people evaluating and dealing with the consequences of the accident and operating the undamaged reactors. Chernobyl’s three other reactors were subsequently restarted but all eventually shut down for good, with the last reactor closing in December 2000. The Soviet government also cut down and buried about a square mile of pine forest near the plant to reduce radioactive contamination at and near the site. A few weeks after the accident, the crews completely covered the damaged unit in a temporary concrete structure, called the “sarcophagus,” to limit further release of radioactive material. The sand was to stop the fire and additional releases of radioactive material the boron was to prevent additional nuclear reactions. The accident and the fire that followed released massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment.Įmergency crews responding to the accident used helicopters to pour sand and boron on the reactor debris. On April 26, 1986, a sudden surge of power during a reactor systems test destroyed Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. This mainly manifested as thyroid cancer, directly caused by radioactive particles of iodine-131 released by the explosion.Backgrounder on Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Accident The data on this risk is murky, with very approximate numbers, but it is estimated that 270,000 people in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus who wouldn't have otherwise developed cancers did develop these illnesses. So the cancer risk is generally more of a concern for those who survived Chernobyl but were exposed to lower levels of radiation. "But remember, the cancer risk is something you see 10 years down the road, so you have to live for 10 more years in order to see ," Nelson said. The main consequence, for them, is an elevated risk of cancer. Lower exposuresīut much of the health focus around Chernobyl survivors has focused on the long-term consequences of the radiation exposure in these areas. The people who survived radiation sickness from Chernobyl took years to recover, and many of them developed cataracts because the radiation damaged the eye lenses, according to the World Health Organization.
This means there is a latency period, when the person might even seem to improve, before showing symptoms of sepsis. While the GI-tract symptoms and burns happen almost immediately to a couple of hours after exposure to the radiation, the bone marrow survives for a couple of days. High levels of radiation can also cause burns and blisters on the skin, which show up minutes to a few hours after the exposure and look just like a sunburn, Nelson said. People who have radiation sickness therefore have a weakened immune system and frequently die of blood poisoning, or sepsis, within a couple of days, he said. But because the radiation is also stopping the bone marrow from producing infection-fighting white blood cells, the body can't fight those infections. This would make even a healthy person sick, Nelson said. When cells cannot properly divide, the mucosa or tissue lining of the GI tract also break downs, releasing cells and the bacteria that live in the gut (including in the stool) into the bloodstream. Within a couple of hours of the exposure, people with radiation sickness develop symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting, Nelson said.
That makes it more susceptible to the radiation (this is also why radiation therapy works to target cancer cells, which also rapidly divide). Those areas have rapidly dividing cells, which means that instead of being tightly coiled and a little more protected, the DNA is unraveled so that it can be copied. Radiation sickness mostly manifests in the gastrointestinal tract and the bone marrow, Nelson said. These people were exposed to radiation levels as high as 8,000 to 16,000 mSv, or the equivalent of 80,000 to 160,000 chest X-rays, according to the World Health Organization. At Chernobyl, 134 liquidators quickly developed radiation sickness, and 28 of them died from it.
0 kommentar(er)
