Chornobyl and the Whack-A-Mole Theory Considerations of Molecular and Cell Biology in Radiobiology.

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Isse, M., Torii, H. A., Uno, K., Fujimiya, H., & Bando, M. (2026). Theoretical interpretation of ecological observations of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: application of the Whack-A-Mole (WAM) model. International Journal of Radiation Biology, 102(5), 487–492.

(The scientists who prepared this paper are Japanese and also have written about the other antinuke wet dream, Fukushima.)

As of this writing, we have arrived at the 40th anniversary of the hydrogen/steam explosion of the famous (or infamous) #4 reactor at Chornobyl which led to the release of vast amounts of radioactivity. This release garnered international attention that has never actually subsided, but most of the environmental destruction connected to the event - the overwhelming majority of it - has been connected with the rise of antinuclear cults which encouraged the incredible destruction worldwide of wilderness for unsustainable land and mass intensive so called "renewable energy." So called "renewable energy" is worse than useless, since it is dependent on the use of the fossil fuels, in many places, such as China and notably Germany, where use of the worst of all fossil fuels, coal, has become entrenched and is rising. The insufficiency and unreliability of so called "renewable energy" has in my view accelerated the use of fossil fuels and has been used widely to greenwash them via the scientifically absurd scientifically illiterate claim that storing energy - which always involves a thermodynamic penalty - is "green."

The so called useless and environmentally pernicious so called "renewable energy" industry has never been about addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere or about addressing fossil fuels at all, and claims to the contrary by antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes are add-ons. The sole purpose, as I've observed personally explicitly over 20 years at DU is to attack the only sustainable form of primary energy there is, nuclear energy.

In Ukraine, which contains the majority of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone - which will be the main topic of this post - along with portions of it in Belarus, the chief loss of life connected with the reactor explosion is connected with the German decision to finance Putin's war on that country by phasing out nuclear energy and buying vast quantities of fossil fuels from Vladmir Putin. The antinuke scam leading to the German embrace of wind and solar energy and the shutting of its perfectly well functioning nuclear reactors has been an environmental, health, and economic disaster. (The former Chancellor of Germany who played a huge role in shutting Germany's nuclear reactors, Gerhard Schroeder, is an openly paid employee of Putin.) While boosting the Russian war economy, allowing for the financing of Russian fossil fuel powered weapons of mass destruction being used to kill Ukrainians, the closure of Germany's nuclear reactors has led to the decline of the German economy, once Europe's strongest, because of high energy prices. These prices (and concomitant environmental impact) are driven by the need for redundant systems which are mostly fossil fuel powered, but also environmentally pernicious batteries, since, as been obvious through all of human history, the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow continuously.

(We might add that there is also enthusiasm for hydrogen, which has mostly been utilized to greenwash fossil fuels, since hydrogen is overwhelmingly made by the steam reformation of fossil fuels. A barely disguised advertising effort to greenwash fossil fuels as "hydrogen" has been conducted at DU by showing vast tracts of industrialized land in China strewn with solar cells. To address the unreliability of the solar scam, China is currently building 95 coal powered plants. Electrolysis, a little used, source of hydrogen is as dirtier in China as it is in most places in the world, than steam reformation of dangerous fossil fuels. China's electricity is still dominated by fossil fuels, mostly coal. )

With this background, let us now turn to the interesting aspects of molecular biology associated with radiation, radiobiology, and discuss the two underlying theoretical approaches that have dominated discussions of it - the "LNT" the "linear no threshold hypothesis" - which has dominated nuclear regulations for nearly a century - and the more recent whimsically named, and in my view, clearly more plausible, "Whack a Mole" hypothesis that has arisen more recently and discuss the evidence for both.

The "LNT" has been utilized by antinukes, like the ignorant asshole Ralph Nader, who gave us among other pernicious outcomes of his miserable existence, worked to give us the worst Chief Justice in US history, with the exception of Roger Taney, John Roberts, when he declared, killing more people with his ignorance than Roberts ever has, by asserting that "there is no safe level of radioactivity," and even dumber, "plutonium is the most toxic substance known."

As I have often pointed out in this space many times over the years, a healthy] 70 kg human being, one not suffering from hypokalemia, will contain more than 4,000 Bq (nuclear decays per second) from the radioactivity associated with natural potassium, an element essential to life, in addition to about 200 Bq from naturally radioactive rubidium, a congener of potassium, rubidium being the most prevalent element in living tissue for which no biological function is known. So it is immediately obvious that there is not only a "safe" level of radioactivity, unless one is radioactive, one will die.

But what about other sources of radioactivity? Does the LNT hold for them?

The Health Physicist, Ed Calabrese, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in a series of lectures available on line funded by the Health Physics Society, has explored in detail, both the history and the validity of the LNT, contending that the LNT is not only invalid, but it originated in an example of scientific fraud. Whether the fraud allegation is justified or not, it is clear that the LNT relies on total doses, independent of time and rate of exposure, whereas the "Whack-A-Mole" explicitly incorporates time as we shall see below. There is a difference between the gamma radiation blast experienced by atomic bomb survivors over a few seconds, as well as exposure to short-lived radionuclides over the first few weeks after the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - many radiation exposure regulations are based on studies of these involuntary human experimental subjects whose exact dosimetry is unknown - and the wolves now living in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone who have lived with temporally constant (but decaying) exposure to radiation.

(There is an excellent documentary put out by PBS, which I have watched, Radioactive Wolves which considers the megafauna now living in the Chornobyl exclusion zone, focusing on wolves.)

It is well known that in the immediate aftermath of the explosion of reactor 4 at Chornobyl, major environmental effects were observed beyond the human consequences, most notably the 30 or so firefighters and plant who died from radiation exposure. Perhaps the most famous of these is the death of the "red forest" where a large number of pine trees died in short order from radiation exposure.

The number of other deaths over the long term that were accelerated owing to radiation exposure remains controversial, but in many studies is not to be thought tremendously large, certainly not comparable to the death toll from exposure to dangerous fossil fuel waste as a result of the normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel plants and devices, about 7 million people per year from air pollution alone, not that antinukes have ever given a flying fuck about fossil fuel deaths. (cf. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249)

Highly radioactive and volatile elements released in varying amounts from the melted fuel in the reactor included ¹³¹I and ¹³³I - probably the most serious - ¹⁰⁶Ru, ¹⁰³Ru, ⁸⁹Sr, ⁹⁰Sr, ¹³⁴Cs, ¹³⁶Cs, ¹³⁷Cs, ¹⁴⁰Ba, ¹⁴⁴Ce, among others; the list is not comprehensive.

Of these listed here ¹³¹I, ¹³³I, ¹⁰⁶Ru, ¹⁰³Ru, ⁸⁹Sr, ¹³⁴Cs, ¹³⁶Cs, ¹⁴⁰Ba, ¹⁴⁴Ce, have all, after 40 years, essentially decayed completely or almost completely, for example ¹³⁴Cs which about 1.5 millionths remains, to stable elements of the same atomic mass number.

From the radioactive decay law, 39.7% of the ¹³⁷Cs remains, and 38.2% of the ⁹⁰Sr remains.

Today, as is widely reported, the "red forest" has largely grown back, and is inhabited by a considerable array of wild animals, as is the entire exclusion zone. A camera "trap" experiment conducted in 2017 captured images of mammals in the "hot" area as shown in the following table:



Beresford, N. A. and Gashchak, S. and Wood, M. D. and Barnett, C. L., Mammals in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone's Red Forest: a motion-activated camera trap study, Earth System Science Data, 15, 2023, 2, 911--920.

It is also known that Wisent, a nearly extinct European bison, which at one point only survived in zoos, is present in the CEZ but was not detected in these experiments, but another nearly extinct animal, one of the last species of wild horses to not be descended from domestic horses, Przewalski's horse, was detected in this experiment.

Since the paper cited at the outset focuses on wolves, as does the PBS documentary, for reference we can say that In the wild wolves have a life span of 5 to 8 years. To my knowledge there is no data on the lifespan of wolves in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Over a period of 8 years, less than 20% of the sup]137Cs and ⁹⁰Sr will decay, and one can assume that over the life of a wolf, exposure to these two radionuclides will remain constant.

The biological availability of the elements for direct internal deposition will vary with these physical chemistry of the elements themselves: Strontium forms largely insoluble carbonates and sulfates, but other species are probably present, and carbonates, if ingested, will be solubilized by stomach acids. Most cesium salts are soluble; however the adhesion of radiocesium to soil particles is well known, shortening the biological availability half-life. Whatever the case we can be sure that animals in the CEZ will absorb internally some fraction of these elements. Strontium, a congener of calcium, will be deposited in bones and teeth; cesium, a congener of sodium and potassium, will be excreted and thus subject to a steady state internal equilibrium superimposed on the bioavailability and physical half-lives.

I have discussed the BCS Class of plutonium - the BCS class refers to the bioavailabilty of substances - of plutonium in a long response initiated by some whining by an ignorant "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke here at DU; the worthy exercise of producing it ended up being more as means a self education exercise than trying to educate a dumb antinuke. (Antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes are generally not educable and I frankly have difficulty restraining my moral contempt for the general class, since their ignorance kills people. They are difficult moles to whack.) It is here: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

So what about "whacking moles?" How does this apply to radiobiology?

Introductory text from the paper cited at the outset of this post:

The authors, in their ethics statement, indicate that they have not personally studied the distribution of animals themselves, but rather have relied on published work by other scientific teams, in particular, these two papers:

Webster, Sarah C, Byrne, Michael E, Lance, Stacey L, Love, Cara N, Hinton, Thomas G, Shamovich, Dmitry, Beasley, James C, TI Where the wild things are: influence of radiation on the distribution of four mammalian species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Front Ecol Environ, 14, 4, 185, 19 2016.

Thomas G. Hinton, Michael E. Byrne, Sarah C. Webster, Cara N. Love, David Broggio, Francois Trompier, Dmitry Shamovich, Sergay Horloogin, Stacey L. Lance, Justin Brown, Mark Dowdall, James C. Beasley, GPS-coupled contaminant monitors on free-ranging Chernobyl wolves challenge a fundamental assumption in exposure assessments, Environment International, Volume 133, Part A, 2019.

The second of these papers, which is open to the public to read, offers a rather innovative approach to studying the exposure of wolves to radiation. The wolves in the CEZ were affixed with radio collars that were both trackers and dosimeters. The authors found that the radiation doses to the wolves were much higher than previously believed.

The first of these papers, utilized motion activated cameras and scent stations placed far apart throughout the CEZ to detect and photograph animals. They included some of the most radioactive zones in the CEZ as described in this map:



The authors of this first paper including this map write:



How can this data be explained? Clearly the LNT is insufficient to do so.

First we need to consider two cases of radiation damage to DNA in cells, the case of somatic cells, the cells of our tissues that represent 99.99% of the cells in mammalian organisms, and germ cells, basically ovum and sperm cells that transmit genetic information between generations. In embryonic tissues, mutations in somatic cells can and sometimes do result in morphological or biological changes, some of which can represent syndromes resulting in health consequences. (My own son apparently experienced a somatic mutation in embryo. It resulted in an obvious change to his appearance, but nothing more. He's otherwise fine.)

Germ cells can be affected as well, and clear examples are known of this, for example the development of the pink grapefruit, which did not exist until it was developed by early 1960's by radiation enthusiasts in the "Atomic Gardening Club" who exposed seeds (where germ cells are far more prevalent than in tissues) to radiation. This is an early example of gene modification, albeit far more randomized than modern GMO techniques. (It is very likely that the natural radiation which has always been present on the planet, and always will be present on the planet, even if, in the case of actinide recycling, nuclear power will reduce but not eliminate natural radioactivity in about 500 to 600 years.)

In mature individuals however, damage to DNA does not necessarily result in disease, since cells with damaged nuclear material often engage in apoptosis, cell death, a normal process that goes on throughout an organisms life on a regular basis. Indeed, this is the concept that underlies radiation treatment of tumors, as well as the use of a specialized set of antibody drug conjugates with "DOTA" complexes to carry radioactive substances directly to cancer cells. Damage to the molecular structures of a functional cancer cell can induce apoptosis. This is well understood. In other cases our immune system readily sorts and kills abnormal cells in many cases owing to changes in display proteins on the surfaces of cells that are part of the "HLA," human leukocyte antigens" in human beings, the codes for which reside in the human case, on chromosome 8. Indeed, many modern treatments for human cancers rely on "training" immune cells to recognize cancer cells and kill them, pembrolizumab, (Keytruda) for instance. A detailed description of immunology is way beyond the scope of this post, and, in fact, beyond any sophisticated competence on my part to teach. However, what is important to note is that the immune system can be stimulated by damaged cells as well as foreign cells. In is only important to state that this fact is increasingly recognized in discussions of radiobiology.

Further, and finally, with respect to molecular biology, many, most, eucaryotic cells contain mechanisms for DNA repair, which restores functionality to particular cells and thus avoiding the need for either apoptosis or an immune response.

The fact that the LNT accounts for none of these mechanisms, and ignores, most importantly, the function of time - including the time to heal from a radiological insult to cells is addressed by discarding the LNT entirely and substituting the "WAM" "Whack a Mole" model.

Returning to the text of the paper discussed at the outset of this post:



The rest of the relevant text from this section is produced as a graphics object to overcome the limitations of the DU editor for mathematical terms:



At this point, it should be completely clear - it is certainly to me - that the models that have informed all radiation regulations with respect to nuclear power, basically the "LNT" model, worsened by the vague and difficult concept of "ALARA" (As Low as Reasonably Achievable) - are not scientifically justifiable and the experimental result - experiment overrides theory in all cases; theory must conform to experiment and not the other way around - of Chornobyl proves this in spades.

A graphic in the text displays the discrepancy:



The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is what is called an "involuntary park," a region where wildlife functions, where wilderness is restored, by preventing access and habitation by humans. Other examples include "Zone Rouge" in France where unexploded ordnance from the First World War is buried in the soil, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal "Wildlife Refuge" where the United States tested artillery shells, the DMZ in Korea, and the Hanford Reservation in Washington where plutonium for nuclear weapons was isolated.

In the case of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, which is connected with a failed nuclear reactor whose flaws have subsequently been designed away, much as the flaws of aircraft are designed away after crashes, there is a particular irony:

Antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes around here and elsewhere, hawk so called "renewable energy" not as an alternative to fossil fuels - except in inherently dishonest afterthoughts - but to nuclear energy. For all their barely literate bullshit they cannot avoid the reality that the wind and solar crap in Germany was put in place not to displace fossil fuels but rather to kill people - since fossil fuel combustion kills people whenever it operates normally via air pollution and climate disaster - but to embrace fossil fuels by replacing nuclear power with coal and gas.

Vast stretches of land, wilderness, have been industrialized in service to the useless "renewable energy" industry, all of which will be waste on a hundreds of millions of tons scale within two decades, where, as I have suggested elsewhere based on curve fitting the data at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory that even a moderately precocious high school student should be able to perform, that we will hit 500 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide by around 2045.

The failed and absurdly expensive "renewable energy" scam depends on destroying wilderness, lacing it with "industrial parks" which are described in some kind of bizarre oxymoronic propaganda as "green." Cutting asphalt access roads to mountain tops to service greasy wind turbines with blades having coatings that spew microplastics from coatings into the air is not "green;" it's violence against the natural world. Chain sawing century old Joshua trees in the California desert to install a solar farm - this has actually happened - is not an act of environmental respect; it's crass and obscene industrial land development.

By comparison, ironically, albeit not without some biological impact, albeit far less than anyone in April and May of 1986 would have predicted, the greatest nuclear energy disaster of all time, has had an overall positive effect on the local natural world, simply by the expedient of making human beings afraid of the place, even if it is nowhere near as dangerous as is generally assumed. Wildlife in the "involuntary park" is thriving, clearly and unambiguously. Two endangered species, the European Wisent, a buffalo, and Przewalski's horse, are protected there unlike anywhere else on Earth. No one, least of all me, would have predicted this outcome in 1986.

As for "whacking moles" we are never going to be able to dispense with the bizarre indifference to the environment exhibited by antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes around here or elsewhere. One goes away, and another appears, spewing the same toxic bullshit and chanting "Fukushima! Chornobyl!" as if these things matter on the scale of the total destruction of the planetary atmosphere. Like other human beings of questionable reasoning ability, and limited educations with respect to the topics they deign to discuss, they will assume absurd "Tucker Carlson" miens of intellectualism in a daily reification of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Orange Pedophile in the White House "ain't got nothing on" antinukes of either kind in my view.

Chornobyl was the event that caused me to educate myself, at first tentatively, and then seriously, and later, perhaps obsessively, about nuclear energy; before that spectacular and widely discussed event, I was a resident of the world of dumb shit antinukes. I am distinctly proud of my ability to change my mind in response to information, something at which the antinuke cults are clearly incapable. I had neither the time or prestige to do anything about what I have come to understand, but among the many greatest sources of pride connected with my beloved family, raising a son to be a nuclear engineer is among the highest. He is charged, with his colleagues, with saving what is left to save in the world. (I thank him for giving me access to the Whack-A-Mole paper, for which my normal channels of literature access was insufficient. This is not a mainstream journal.)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl reactor 4 explosion. I would like to suggest that after 40 years, we should have learned something, and if, as is increasingly unlikely in our "sound bite" "click bait" world, if we looked seriously, deeply, and profoundly, we would do so. We might surprise ourselves, much as I already have.

Have a nice Sunday.