Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?
- By Adam Higginbotham
- April 14, 2011 |
- 2:52 am |
- Wired May 2011
This mutant pig fetus was collected near Chernobyl in 1988.
Photo: Guillaume Herbaut
The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February afternoon, about 2 miles from the concrete sarcophagus that now entombs the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Gennadi Milinevsky, a physicist from a university in Kiev, walks along a path carpeted with pine needles and patches of recent snow. The size of a transistor radio, the dosimeter emits a sharp click when it detects a radioactive particle. Milinevsky waves the instrument: Its digital readout indicates levels of radiation 120 times higher than normal. As he walks, the staccato popping gets faster as the levels climb to 250 times higher than normal. “It’s not good,” he says. He ventures toward a wide clearing littered with the trunks of dead trees. Milinevsky suggests stopping the tour here. On the far side of the clearing, he knows, the dosimeter will begin to make a sound no one wants to hear: a terrifying snowstorm of screeching white noise, indicating highly toxic levels of gamma radiation some 1,000 times above normal.
This is the poisoned heart of the Red Forest, nearly 4,000 acres of pine trees that were blanketed with radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium, plutonium, and microscopic pieces of uranium that roiled from the blazing core of reactor number four over 10 days in April and May of 1986. The pines died in a matter of days, the russet needles marking the windblown path of the most deadly radioactivity to escape the burning reactor. Twenty-five years later, it remains one of the most contaminated ecosystems on earth.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now encompasses more than 1,600 square miles of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, a ragged swatch of forests, marshes, lakes, and rivers. Cordoned off by a fence and armed guards soon after the accident, the perimeter was first drawn up according to airborne surveys of gamma radiation contamination conducted in the days after the explosions, and it has since been expanded more than once. The current zone extends up to 60 miles from the power plant, the main entrance on the Ukraine side blocked by a paramilitary checkpoint equipped with radiation screening tools. Deeper within the region, a 6-mile zone designates the most heavily contaminated areas around the plant.
In the months after the accident, Soviet authorities undertook drastic measures to deal with the catastrophe. Almost 1,000 acres of the Red Forest had perished, and nearly 4 square miles of topsoil around the sarcophagus was scraped away and buried as radioactive waste. Of the 250 settlements and villages in the zone that were evacuated, the most radioactive were bulldozed in their entirety and interred. Contaminated livestock were slaughtered, and abandoned pet dogs were shot by teams of local hunters. By the time the process of liquidation was finished, the land surrounding the reactor had been transformed into a sterile moonscape, a nightmarish post-nuclear wasteland flattened by machinery and sprayed with chemicals designed to trap radioactive particles close to the ground.
Today, wolves, lynx, and elk roam the area around the reactor.
Photo: Guillaume Herbaut
Since then, nature has slowly crept in. Once an area of heavy industry and collectivized agriculture, the zone is now nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. The forest has reclaimed long-abandoned villages and farmland; roads and buildings are being swallowed up by thickets of trees and shrubs. The natural process of radioactive decay has already removed some toxic particles from the environment. Those isotopes with short half-lives have already disappeared. Some longer-lived isotopes gradually leached into the soil and have been dispersed by wind, birds, and insects.
About a decade ago, the animal sightings began. Naturalists started to report signs of an apparently remarkable recovery in the ecology of the quarantined territory. They photographed the tracks of a brown bear and saw wolves and boar roaming the streets of the abandoned town of Pripyat. In 2002, a young eagle owl—one of only 100 thought to be living in all of Ukraine at the time—was seen dozing on an abandoned excavator near the sarcophagus. The following year, an endangered white-tailed eagle was captured and radio-tagged within 3 miles of the plant. By early 2005, a herd of 21 rare Przewalski’s horses that had escaped from captivity in the quarantined area six years earlier had bred successfully and expanded to 64. It seemed the disaster that had banished industry, agriculture, pesticides, cars, and hunting from Chernobyl had inadvertently created a sprawling wildlife park.
A 2006 report by the Chernobyl Forum—an international panel of 100 experts assembled by the UN, the World Health Organization, and the International Atomic Energy Agency—lent scientific weight to the evolving notion that the Exclusion Zone was turning into a haven for wildlife. The report, based on environmental, socioeconomic, and human health research, explained that levels of radioactivity in the zone had declined several-hundred-fold and took an optimistic view of the disaster’s aftermath, both for human beings and animals. While there was no denying that some central areas of the zone, including the Red Forest, remained acutely contaminated and potentially lethal, the authors stated that no adverse effects of low-level radiation had been reported in plants or animals in much of the area around the reactor. Rather, the size and diversity of the animal population had actually expanded in the absence of people. “The Exclusion Zone,” the authors concluded, “has paradoxically become a unique sanctuary for biodiversity.”
It was an amazing story—sinister wasteland transforms into blooming, post-nuclear Eden—and it became the subject of documentaries on Animal Planet and the BBC and a central theme of the book Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. It was also used by Gaia theorist James Lovelock to argue that we could save the rain forests from the ravages of man by burying nuclear waste in them. This idea, of nature healing itself even in the face of the grievous wounds mankind can inflict, is as appealing as it is counterintuitive.
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