The plant suffered a meltdown in 2011 after it was hit by a tsunami that damaged several of its reactor cores, leaving the surrounding area largely inaccessible to humans without suffering health consequences.
In the decade since the incident, multiple generations of local animals have been exposed to the radiation. But a team at Colorado State University have studied wild boar and rat snakes across a range of radiation exposures and did not find any significant adverse health effects.
First author Dr Kelly Cunningham said their findings could suggest that people do not need to be as fearful of moving back into the remediated areas as they thought.
The wildlife study particularly relevant to humans because human physiology is relatively similar to wild boar, said co-author James Beasley. While mice have traditionally been used as a radiation biology model from which human effects are extrapolated, pigs – which are descendants of wild boar – are physiologically...