OverviewThe Chernobyl Accident and its Consequences
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Statement of Search Strategies Used and Sources of Information
We search edour own peer-reviewed data and personal files as well as PubMed for English-language articles, references of relevant articles and textbooks published during the period from the Chernobyl accident, 1986, including those that appeared in the former Soviet Union official sources, through to October 2010, using the search terms ‘Chernobyl and thyroid’, ‘thyroid cancer’, ‘radiation-induced thyroid cancer’, ‘liquidators and Chernobyl’, ‘radiation risk’, and ‘radiation dose and 131I and
Accident and Radioactive Releases from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
The CNPP is located in the north of Ukraine, close to the junction of the borders of three states, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The accident at Reactor Number 4 took place shortly after midnight on 26 April 1986. A number of accounts of the accident, some giving a minute by minute sequence, have been published. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) [1], the course of events could be summarised as follows. Due to some reactor design
Radioactive Contamination of Territories
The dynamic meteorological conditions, including the wind, cloudiness, temperature, humidity and precipitations, together with varying physicochemical characteristics of the radioactive materials released at different times after the reactor destruction, defined the heterogeneous pattern of the ground contamination [7], [8], [9]. Figure 1 shows reconstructed plume traces over part of Europe.
Further monitoring of the territories permitted a contamination pattern to be established based on
Groups Radiologically Affected by the Accident
There are three major groups of individuals for whom estimation of radiation health effects after Chernobyl is particularly important. These are the workers involved in the actions during the accident or in the mitigation of the aftermath, those individuals who lived close to the CNPP site and were evacuated after the accident, and those who continued to reside in the contaminated areas further from the CNPP. All were exposed to radiation at different times after the accident, under different
Major Medical and Epidemiological Studies of the Chernobyl Accident
The scale of the accident and the number of people affected by it were unprecedented; therefore, initially, it was very difficult to predict possible health consequences. In 2002, Nagataki [34], evaluating the state of knowledge about Chernobyl, designated the major post-accident periods as follows: 1986–1989 information difficult to obtain; 1990–1991 exchanges with other countries initiated; 1992 case reports: childhood thyroid cancer; 1992–1994 period of ascertainment; 1995 ascertainment and
Discussion
Here we present an overview of the major aspects of the accident at the CNPP, the initial response to the accident, both locally and with the involvement of international bodies, and its radiological and health consequences, with a particular focus on thyroid cancer.
As a result of the large release of radioactivity, large groups of the population received radiation doses. These included clean-up workers and the general population that was either evacuated from the settlements in the vicinity of
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank V. Shpak (IEM AMSU, Kiev, Ukraine), M. Maksioutov, K. Tumanov, S. Chekin, V. Kashcheev, A. Korelo, O. Vlassov, N. Shchukina (MRRC RAMS, Obninsk, Russia) and T. Rogounovitch (Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan) for their assistance in preparing material for this article. This work was supported in part by Nagasaki University Global COE program and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 22256004 (to SY) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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