How Nuclear Radiation Affects Future Generations

[bananas]

http://news.discovery.com/human/nuclear-radiation-exposure-gender-110607.html

How Nuclear Radiation Affects Future Generations
Women may be more likely to give birth to boys than girls following a nuclear radiation event.
By Emily Sohn
Tue Jun 7, 2011 07:00 AM ET

After exposure to nuclear radiation events, women may be more likely to give birth to boys than to girls, suggests a new study.

The study documented a localized spike in the ratio of boy-to-girl births after the Chernobyl disaster and similar trends from the delayed fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1960s and 1970s. The researchers also found a smaller but still disproportionate number of boy births close to nuclear facilities in Germany and Switzerland.

It's not yet clear whether radiation interferes with the father's sperm, the mother's body before she gets pregnant, the development of the embryo or fetus, or something else. But because skewed sex ratios can be a sign of other underlying health problems, the study offers a new category of concern about events like the recent nuclear disaster in Japan.

"The dogma was that this effect was not possible or that there was no effect of this kind," said Hagen Scherb, a biostatistician at the Helmholtz Zentrum München in Munich, Germany. "Now, we can most clearly demonstrate that there is an effect. And this changes our thinking about radiation risks."

<snip>

[bananas]

1. More information and a link to the study (free pdf and html format)

here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x296591

edit to add:

The paper is free in pdf or html format at http://www.springerlink.com/content/w822527526045772 /

Among the conclusions in the paper:

5 Conclusions and outlook

Our observations add evidence to findings in the field of
radiation epidemiology indicating considerably underestimated
health risks of the so-called low-level (< 100 mSv)
ionizing radiation ...
This means that the internationally established radiation
risk concept based on average absorbed dose is in error at
three to four orders of magnitude or, more likely, it is
conceptually wrong.

<snip>

[Zoeisright]

2. Yep. Nukes poison the earth forever.

Too bad the nuke porn crowd doesn't get that.

[bananas]

3. And we still don't know what to do with the waste

The National Academy of Science says it has to be contained for a million years.
We've never built anything that lasted a million years.