Chernobyl -- 20 years later

By Aussiegirl

As idyllic a natural habitat as Chernobyl appears to have become, I doubt any of us would hasten to buy property there and move. I suspect that there is a strong undertone of the wacko environmentalist attitude about some of this as evidenced by this quote:
"On the surface," she says, "radiation is very good for wildlife because it forces people to leave the contaminated area. They removed 135,000 people from an area twice the size of Luxembourg ... It is a radioactive wilderness, and it is thriving."

Strikes me as the same kind of thinking as those who say that mankind is a plague that must be wiped out for the earth to return to its pristine purity. The effect on people is much more damaging and long-lasting -- animals don't live long enough to develop the cancers and other diseases that develop decades down the road from exposure. Chernobyl has been a huge disaster for the Ukrainian people -- economically, medically and psychologically. Let's be grateful that Mother Nature heals herself, but let's not underestimate the harm done or make light

Chernobyl shows nature will stroll in wherever man fears to tread - 06 Apr 2006 - World News

Near what is left of Chernobyl's ill-fated fourth reactor, a pair of elks is grazing nonchalantly on land irradiated by the world's worst nuclear accident.

In nearby Pripyat, an eerie husk of a town where 50,000 people lived before they were forced to flee on a terrifying afternoon in 1986, a Soviet urban landscape is rapidly giving way to wild European woodland.

Radiation levels remain far too high for human habitation, but the abandoned town is filled with birdsong. Twenty years after the reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all.

[...] Mary Mycio, an American foreign correspondent in the area and a biologist, was one of the first people to begin cataloguing nature's unlikely comeback in Chernobyl and has made 24 different trips to the dead zone.

"On the surface," she says, "radiation is very good for wildlife because it forces people to leave the contaminated area. They removed 135,000 people from an area twice the size of Luxembourg ... It is a radioactive wilderness, and it is thriving."

Mycio admits, however, that some scientists question what is happening to flora and fauna at a cellular and genetic level.

The few studies that have been done have exposed minor genetic changes in small animals and birds such as mice and barn swallows, including depressed fertility.

In a comprehensive assessment of the damage caused by the Chernobyl accident, the British ecologists Jim Smith and Nick Beresford point out that radiation levels considered potentially dangerous to humans have little if any effect on wildlife.

"Animals in the wild are less prone to cancer than human populations," they say. "They are most likely to be killed by natural predators or starvation before they reach an age at which cancer risk increases," they say.

Not all scientists accept this assessment. Anders Moller and Timothy Mousseau studied swallows in the zone and found they carry a significantly higher level of "germline" mutations in their sperm and eggs.

"Our work indicates that the worst is yet to come in the human population. The consequences for generations down the line could be greater than we've seen so far," said Mousseau, a biology professor at the University of South Carolina.