Chernobyl Effect On Animals

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The radiation that comes off of a nuclear power plant when it has a very serious meltdown is immense. Chernobyl alone had as much radiation as 20 of the bombs that the U.S dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There have been two major meltdowns in the past 100 year which include Chernobyl which is in the Ukraine and the Fukushima reactor which is in Japan. Animal mutations can either be bodily mutations which can be very disturbing and some that don't affect the image of the animal at all but do affect the lifespan of the animal that was affected. I will talk about both of the large meltdowns and how Chernobyl and a major affect on land animals and how Fukushima had a major affect on the animals in the sea mostly.

The Fukushima reactor
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It is one of the most significant unintentional releases of radioactivity into the environment to date. Animals living in contaminated areas in and around Chernobyl have suffered from a variety of side effects caused by radiation. The radiation has had a large effect on the development of the nervous system because of the low amounts of antioxidants found there. The brain sizeof animals has dramatically decreased sense the radiation from Chernobyl, and it has impaired cognitive abilities. Many animals have had serious genetic abnormalities which include growing of extra limbs, two heads, smaller brain size, no feet, and many others that come from the effect that radiation has on a living organism's DNA. Twenty nine years after the world’s largest nuclear accident the amount of radiation around the reactor which was so high in turned an entire forest red is slowly but surely returning to its natural levels before the accident. The amount of birth defects, abnormalities and cancer in the area are dropping dramatically. Some animals have even shown that there DNA is changing so that they can handle the large amount of radiation in the area. One interesting fact about the incident is that where the reactor blew up and where the amount of radiation is the highest there are actually some birds that are living in it. . The downside to all of this is that the lakes that are surrounding this are still the most radioactive areas around the whole place. Fish in the lakes and ponds are still struggling to live in the large amounts of radiation that is in the bottom layers of the dirt in the lake. Hopefully in the future there will be no more mutations and everything will go back to