Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nuclear accident there in 1986, creatures of all sorts have come flooding back to this once-busy land-
scape of farmland, villages, urban areas, and forests. This came as a huge surprise to almost everyone.
In the immediate aftermath of the world's worst nuclear power accident, a cloud containing radioactivity
equivalent to twenty Hiroshima bombs blew north from the burning power station, heading over the bor-
der from Ukraine into Belarus. Some areas received massive radiation doses. An area known as the “red
forest” turned rusty brown and died. After the accident, Soviet authorities removed all humans living
within twenty miles of the reactor. The risk of the lingering radiation causing cancers and other diseases
was very real. But the immediate damage to the nature they left behind was mostly much less drastic.
While the area still sets off Geiger counters, nature has made a huge comeback. Native species have
reveled in the absence of humans, and many new species have moved in too.
Today, radioactive wolves (
Canis lupus lupus
) patrol the streets of Pripyat, once a city of fifty thou-
sand people and now the largest ghost town in the world. Strontium-stuffed mushrooms flourish in the
surrounding marshes. Mice scamper around the abandoned power-station reactors, and wild boars root
in the cesium-soaked soils. British radiation physicist and keen angler Dave Timms caught a sixty-six-
pound catfish in contaminated Chernobyl cooling ponds, where altogether thirty-eight fish species live.
For some wildlife, the radiation may make their lives shorter. But nature overall is doing fine, living
off the fat of the land. Top carnivores like lynx, eagles, and wolves do especially well. There are also
moose, beavers, badgers, and otters. Migrating birds drop by as if nothing had changed. Black storks,
green cranes, and white-tailed eagles are breeding. Deer shelter from winter storms in derelict country
cottages. Rich grasslands and pine forests are moving in on the old collective farms. Sergey Gaschak, a
Ukrainian naturalist who works for the International Radioecological Laboratory in Slavutich, the city
built to house refugees from the exclusion zone, told me: “There are more opportunities for wildlife. The
villages and towns have more diverse conditions than surrounding landscapes, with buildings, ponds,
gardens and different kinds of vegetation.” Only pigeons and rats, which once relied on human leftovers
to flourish, have failed to prosper.
Visiting Western scientists agree. “Most people think of the zone as a post-Apocalyptic wilderness,
either occupied by two-headed monsters that glow in the dark, or completely empty,” says Jim Smith of
Britain's Portsmouth University. “But from the wildlife point of view, the disaster has been beneficial,
because it forced people out. Wild animals rarely die of the diseases of old age. Wildlife in the Chernobyl
zone is now more abundant and diverse than before the accident.”
32
Cham Dallas of the University of
Georgia found that Chernobyl mice are more radioactive than any creature ever found before in the
wild. Yet they seem virtually untouched by the experience. A team from Texas Tech University, led by
Ron Chesser, found that genetic variation among voles (
Myodes glareolus
) in the exclusion zone reflec-
ted nothing more than natural variability. This, they said, “failed to support” arguments that there were
mutations as a result of the accident.
33
In Belarus, where the radioactive fallout was greatest, scientists swiftly saw the conservation poten-
tial of an area from which people were excluded. Two years after the disaster, they set up the Polesye
State Radiation Ecological Reserve to protect wildlife in the zone. It is, by some measure, the largest
area in Europe set aside exclusively for nature. Fearing radioactive water flowing out of the zone into
rivers like the Pripyat and Braginka, Belarus authorities dammed drainage channels. The result is the
most radioactive wetland in the world, containing a gloriously diverse assembly of black grouse, part-
ridge, roe deer, and much else. Ukraine's reformist government, in August 2014, announced plans to set
up its own biosphere reserve, including most of the exclusion zone around the reactor, setting the scene
for a cross-border radioactive nature reserve twice the size of Rhode Island.
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