Chernobyl wildlife forty years on
bbc.com113 points by reconnecting 15 hours ago
113 points by reconnecting 15 hours ago
What's amazing to me is how little space is required to have a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. A 60km diameter circle just doesn't seem like a very big space to have enough plants to support "flourishing" numbers of multiple types of large herbivores, without migration, as well as all the different prey species required to keep things in balance.
Regardless of the arguments about radiation, it seems pretty clear that lack of humans is really the most important thing for animals to flourish.
Just to put things in perspective; a square kilometre can support nearly 250 cows in ideal conditions. The exclusion zone is 2827 square kilometres. Forest supports fewer animals, but on the other hand most of them are a lot smaller than cows. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many thousands of animals of all types living in the area.
With our planes, trains and automobiles 60km doesn’t seem like a long way, but try walking that distance through untracked forest. It would take days. We’re totally cut off from nature in most of our daily lives.
The European green belt is an even starker example, it’s thousands of miles long but just a few tens to hundreds meters wide in most locations, yet its stability and continuity have made it a huge wildlife conservation area.
thank you. TIL. Hiking the Green Belt sounds like an interesting long-term hiking project
At a glance the part of it that goes along the Polish coastline is largely forests growing on the sand dunes at the coast.
The experience is mixed, as while you can find amazing places like Słowiński Park Narodowy, where due to proximity to the lake and sea light pollution is low enough to behold the Milky Way, most of that section is interrupted by footpaths for beachgoers and really busy in season.
Chernobyl exclusion zone is not same as it was 40 years ago. For example in 2019 research was done on growing crop in the exclusion zone. You could even buy Atomik vodka, made with grain and water from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49251471
In 2022 the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) in cooperation with State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management has published the initial results of the radiological remapping of the exclusion zone. The data can be used to assess which areas of the exclusion zone could be reopened for use. The start of Russian invasion halted all this activities and research.
https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/EN/2022...
Actually some lands were returned back to commercial usage. The land is extremely beautiful and rich. They have even created new resorts on the former land of the Exclusion Zone. [1]
I have been a part of the working group researching possible commercial usage of contaminated land, which should not be returned into agriculture or cannot be made livable BUT is perfectly suitable for things like prison, recycling plant or launch pad for space.
They write all this `scientificy` stuff then put stuff like "Recent research has found that the combination of heat emitted from radioactive contamination ..."
The energy released by these environmental isotopes is microscopic. By the time that energy dissipates into the surroundings, the macroscopic thermal output is practically zero. It cannot alter local temperatures, it cannot warm a microclimate, and it certainly cannot cause "heat" stress to wildlife.
I wonder if the editors added this bit in a bout of 'whatboutism' to get some global warming agenda in there?
They totally made this up because in the linked source it's just "Radioactive contamination and climate warming affect physiological performance of Chornobyl barn swallows" and not "radioactive warming".
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It’s embarrassing for humanity that we cause an almighty ecological disaster and then one of the biggest factors in the recovery of local ecosystems is our absence.
Related, if you haven't seen the TV show Chernobyl, I could not recommend it highly enough!
For a TV series the TV show Chernobyl was pretty accurate. For those who watched the the TV show, I recommend to also see an interview with an actual Ukrainian medical responder and radiation expert who was working in Chernobyl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GEPsSVpZY
Probably the best non-technical book on the Chernobyl disaster is the book "Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe" by Serhii Plokhy. It describes not only the accident, but also the whole soviet system and political, economical decisions which led to the resulting catastrophe.
The most comprehensive technical report is INSAG-7 The Chernobyl Accident - IAEA. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...
No, the show is not accurate. The last episode repeats the lies that Legasov told at the IAEA meeting in 1986, that were published as INSAG-1, and the show completely ignores INSAG-7. There was no drama in the control room, no indications that anything was wrong with the reactor, no power spike before AZ-5 was pressed.
It was a drama TV show, not a documentary. Whey compare it with TV shows, like Simpsons or movies like The China Syndrome, it was accurate.
"according to INSAG-1, the main cause of the accident was the operators' actions, but according to INSAG-7, the main cause was the reactor's design."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_Cherno...
I'm just about old enough to remember seeing the live coverage of this and Challenger on BBC Newsround, as a kid.
Couldn't find that broadcast, but HN might enjoy BBC "On this day": http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/april/28/newsid_4...
It is silly how the show depicted Dyatlov as an arrogant sargeant behaving like a bully in American series about mid school kids.
This alone sets the tone of a TV show that needs to have clear goodies and baddies, and obviously life is never that simple.
There is a real interview with Dyatlov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8__v9EswN4
This. Also, Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl" is brilliant prose about the disaster, from the run-up through to the aftermath. At times, it reads more like a thriller (and a fast-paced one at that!) than prose.
Higginbotham uses Medvedev's book as a source. Medvedev worked in the Ministry of Energy and he was their special representative in Chernobyl after the incident. His task was to cover the asses of the ministry and the reactor designers, so this book invented a lot of "facts" to put the blame on the operators, Dyatlov and Fomin.
I also recommend Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, some of people the characters from the book are even present in the TV series.
I thought the show was horrible. It was moralistic, quite on the nose, and the dialogue was pretty corny. There were a lot of obvious appeals to your average NYT and Atlantic type viewer, which is surely the main factor behind its critical acclaim.
I found the dialog fairly realistic. Maybe because I grew up in a similar country - it sounded like real world people talk.
Also, events and actions were close to how reality unfolded with simplified cast of characters, basically.
> During the 40 years since the disaster, it has become clear that many species are living quite happily within the 37-mile-wide (60km) exclusion zone set up around the ruined power plant. But that's not to say nature hasn't changed here – sometimes for the worse.
So.. the radiations has had virtually no impact on the natural ecosystem's regrowth?
Not only... we've always been told about the disastrous consequences of nuclear radiation, but, according to the BBC article (by Chris Baraniuk), that's not the case.
I don't know... I'm quite perplexed.
Well.
There are dogs roaming around the Buryakovka nuclear waste storage facility. About ~10 years ago I have been told that their average lifespan was in a ballpark of three years. Make what you will from it.
OTOH Przewalski's horses are just thriving in the Zone!
Nobody's measuring cancer rates in wild animals.
Due to our long lifespan, humans are relatively vulnerable to radiation, radioactive materials, and other bioaccumulative poisons. A fish might not accumulate enough mercury to kill itself over its lifetime, but when you eat one every day it all adds up.
This was why the disaster was so bad for so many farmers across Europe: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-36112372 ; the caesium is not enough to kill a sheep, which has a life of one or two years before slaughter, but should not be consumed by humans.
The man-made radioactive isotope caesium-137 can be detected in the bodies of all living humans and it was there even before the Chernobyl accident. The first nuclear explosion in 1945 spread, for the first time, the isotope caesium-137 over the whole planet. We have so sensitive methods of detecting caesium-137 that we can use them to check if a bottle of wine was produces before 1945
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/03/318241738/ho...
Of-course there were radionuclides in our bodies even before the first nuclear test in 1945. For example Potassium-40 or Carbon-14. The presence of Carbon-14 in organic matter is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method to date archaeological, geological and hydrogeological samples.
The big question is how much radionuclides is safe and how much radionuclides is a health risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relation...
He didn't say that though. He said many species are living quite happily, but nature has also changed, sometimes for the worse
Just like the Falkland's penguins who inhabit an area filled with landmines, keeping humans out is just as crucial to biodiversity as any measure to assist the wildlife within.
What surprises me is the constant attention to Chernobyl (TV series, books, articles, games) and the almost complete silence about Fukushima.
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?
How about a movie or more attention to the civilizational cataclysm that was burning coal near inhabited areas? Major cities during the coal burning area would seem post apocalyptic to us now.
They're incomparable.
In Fukushima four PWR type reactors (which is just a large metal pot) melted but stayed inside the containment vessels.
In Chernobyl, an RBMK reactor, which is a ginormous slab of graphite, exploded outwards and burned for ten days, releasing mind-boggling amounts of radioactive hot particles into the top layers of the atmosphere, thus contaminating the whole world.
Incomparable.
We should have an movie or TV series about the most deadly accident related to production of energy. No, it not the Chernobyl accident.
It was 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in Henan province in Central China, which is still not much known in the West.
its easy: - Udssr did something wrong its very useful to this day for the us. - Fukushima was done by an "western orientated" country. - The fact that people say that chernobyl was worse then Fukushima is them not thinking. Fukushima was build in a area were this kind of accidents happen all the time. - If Fukushima happened in China you would have more netflix tv shows about it how bad it was handled. - Remember western media is going through an American lens. Just watch any main stream holy wood movie about war and think of it as US propaganda and you will see it everywhere
The USSR made several key decisions which made Chernobyl a far more dangerous and deadly situation and it's important that the decision making process is studied and understood to stop it from being repeated. As far as I'm aware Fukushima was a series of unlikely events when brought together ended in a disaster. The decision making process was fairly open to the public and open to international scrutiny and criticism.
Fukushima wasn't mishandled quite so badly, didn't kill significant numbers of rescue workers, didn't require emergency containment, and didn't contaminate half of Western Europe (most of it ended up in the Pacific).
However it was still enough to make Germany shut down its working reactors.
How many rescue workers did it kill?
I had to go and look it up: none. There is a lot of discourse about the number of people killed directly or indirectly during or after the evacuation, however ..
Some people definitely died in the evacuation due to the tsunami. Were any additional evacuated due to the nuclear implication?
They are not comparable accidents, Fukishima had no direct casualties and mostly very local effects and Chernobyl needs no introduction. I guess the cause / back story is more interesting for Chernobyl as well because of the human and political aspects.
1. It was truly the first nuclear disaster of this scale that gave a huge boost to the green movements all over the world, at the time when they were already on the rise
2. Most of that attention actually came years later from the former USSR itself, where Chernobyl was massively influential. It had a nationwide cleanup campaign. Along with the other two major contemporary disasters (Spitak earthquake and Ufa disaster) it brought massive political change. Free press in the USSR, questioning the competency of the party and the scientific/engineering communities, fears of future man-made disasters on chemical plants and other industrial facilities, massive charity campaigns in USSR, creation of disaster relief agencies in post-Soviet republics etc. Even the post-Soviet wave of pulp fiction is partially the result of Chernobyl. Fukushima didn't bring even 1/10 of that change to Japan.
> games
However this one is largely unrelated. STALKER SoC that popularized Chernobyl isn't actually about the Chernobyl disaster at all, it just uses the Exclusion Zone as a decoration, after pivoting from the original, much more ambitious concept during the development. They famously overpromised and underdelivered, and the interest was mostly there due to the community deciding to mod this jank into the game they've been promised. So it's mostly a coincidence and a result of a great marketing campaign by the original GSC.
First big disaster of its kind directly resulting in death, almost certain to get more attention. Plus it allowed for substantial propaganda points (probably well deserved) against the USSR during the Cold War, their opponents would have been stupid not to take advantage of the disaster to ridicule them for their incompetence.
There are regular reports on Fukushima progress from the Japanese media agency (whose initials escape me for now*). I'm guessing you're not seeing these.
These are not comparable accidents for a number of reasons, direct radiation deaths for one:
Chernobyl: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor, killing 30 operators and firemen within three months and several further deaths later. One person was killed immediately and a second died in hospital soon after as a result of injuries received. Another person is reported to have died at the time from a coronary thrombosisc. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was originally diagnosed in 237 people onsite and involved with the clean-up and it was later confirmed in 134 cases. Of these, 28 people died as a result of ARS within a few weeks of the accident.
There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident, but over 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a preventative measure.
* --- EDIT: NHK is Japan's public service broadcaster!(??) See: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/tag/8/
for those tagged "Fukishima" (I think) .. they have had something new every three to six months since it happened (more doco's then, fewer now)
For a deep dive into the state of life in the exclusion zone about a decade and a half after the disaster, I highly recommend reading Wormwood Forest, by Mary Mycio, published in 2005.
1) It is always interesting with nuclear articles to separate the language from the actual measure of harm. On the one hand we have the "abandoned, irradiated landscape of Chernobyl... not far from the ruins of the power plant at the centre of the world's worst nuclear disaster". On the other hand we have all these animals who, being unable to read and forced to rely on observable harm, think the situation is pretty good.
This article is much better than most because it links a study that talks about the actual levels of radiation around Chernobyl, but the amount of legwork these reporters make people do to try and figure out the "so what?" of the thing is remarkably lazy. It baffles me how fearful people get without being at all worried about whether there is an observable problem.
> For years, researchers have documented weird, twisted trees, swallows troubled by tumours and even an eerie black fungus that lives inside the radioactive ruins of the reactor building itself.
I mean, y'know, oh no! Outside the Chernobyl exclusion zone I can't imagine encountering a twisted tree or a cancerous swallow. How big an issue are we talking? Are they going to make me spend my afternoon reading papers? Are these swallows helpful enough to live only in the irradiated areas for us or are these swallows migratory? What's their air-speed velocity?
I won't even begin on the horrifying implications of black fungus. My poor bathroom needs a clean.
2) This is one of the few places on earth where these animals are safe from the #1 apex predator that is actively ... I don't know what the next one up from genocide is, lets say ... speciescidal. I'd expect wild mutations since the most important evolutionary pressure in the rest of the world isn't present. While evolution due to radiation is possible it is going to be quite challenging to tease that out. Evolution due to human irrationality creating an animal sanctuary seems more likely.
The chernobyl radiation issue denial on HN runs strong.
The opposite psychological symptom is Radiophobia. The psychological effects of radiation fear after Chernobyl accident were strong:
"As the increase in radiation in Denmark was so low that almost no increased risk of birth defects was expected, the public debate and anxiety among the pregnant women and their husbands "caused" more fetal deaths in Denmark than the accident. This underlines the importance of public debate, the role of the mass media and of the way in which National Health authorities participate in this debate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia#Chernobyl_abortion...
Amateur nuclear propagandists desperately want to win one against the solarbros and windwakers.
The longer you live, the more of a problem cancer is. Most animals have pretty short lifespans compared to humans. I think that must also be a factor.