How Did the Chernobyl Disaster Affect Human Health? It's been about 35 years since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Now researchers have investigated whether exposure to ionizing radiation released in the accident caused lasting effects in the genomes that were passed from exposed parents to their children. A second study focused on cancerous thyroid tumors that developed in people that were exposed to the radiation as children or neonates. The findings, which suggested that the radiation exposure did not cause intergenerational impacts and that certain genes drove thyroid tumor development in those that got cancer, have been reported in two research studies in