Chernobyl wildlife forty years on
bbc.com
bbc.com
Regardless of the arguments about radiation, it seems pretty clear that lack of humans is really the most important thing for animals to flourish.
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.
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...
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.
That sounds a bit dark.
So that we can take younger first offenders and rehabilitate them and give them purpose in life.
Unfortunately, no one in the government we did discuss that gave any shit about the future of younger generation of Ukrainians.
(I assume what makes it acceptable for a prison, but not "livable" is that prison inmates do not roam around, but are enclosed in a artificial compound?)
And for whether government is interested, I suppose also depends on how much more expensive it would have been?
Much simpler. The main concerns are digging (radioactive fallout is about 30cm deep into the ground at this point) and unmapped hot spots. Basically, there could be a patch of the land with radioactivity high enough that it has to be either deactivated or tagged out.
> government is interested
One of the cultural gaps between us, russian [1] people and western world is the vast depth is misunderstanding of the function of government. Our governments is only interested in personal enrichment and the well being of people is never a factor. Literally.
[1] as in "slavic people", not "citizens of russian federation".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave
slave(n.)
c. 1300, sclave, esclave, "person who is the chattel or property of another," from Old French esclave (13c.) and directly from Medieval Latin Sclavus "slave" (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally "Slav" (see Slav); so used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.
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.
Obviously it’s possible, but I was surprised.
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?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Here's a few randoms to give you a sense:
In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. - J.C.R. Licklider and R. W. Taylor (1968)
Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it. - Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
The benefit of using [a formal specification language] is that it teaches you to think rigorously, to think precisely, and the important point is the precise thinking. So what you need to avoid at all costs is any language that's all syntax and no semantics. - Leslie Lamport
The only function of what we do, of art or of anything, is to give voice to the unspoken: to give it a form that it's never been perceived in before. We can't change the evolution of history or gentrification, you can't stop it but at least you can say "look what you're losing". All we can do is give an image to an idea. - Chris Doyle
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it. - Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid
Both Ukraine and Russia have plenty of rural landscape. Neither government is trying to shove people into cities against their own will. Occasionally villages try to attract younger people, but those dont really wanna.
(But in both countries, urban people rarely move to villages due to lack of employment opportunities and do move to cities to get jobs.)
You can't put the full measure of ecological complexity into a small cage in a zoo.
We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.
AFAICT the Highlands (like much of the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK) aren't wild now, they're a sort of overgrazed brownfield site with damaged drainage patterns that have been reduced to a handful of species.
That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.
Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.
The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.
This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.
An example of rewilding on its wikipedia page is "wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses". That's literally going the "making areas more friendly to wildlife" route.
When it comes to 15-minute cities there's all these conspiracies, but then you look behind it and it's just about allowing economic liberty to build taller and allow more commercial uses like doctors, daycares, and corner stores in residential neighborhoods, and restrict free government subsidized street parking.
It's good to be viligant, okay? And if any policies come up that are shoving people into cities, feel free to protest. But until then, a lot of the policies are actually exactly the "being more friendly to wildlife" that you're asking for and not shoving people into cities.
We have the misanthropic billionaire Tetrapak heir buying swathes of countryside in the same region and wanting to kick the remaining people off it.
There are plenty of policies pushing people into cities. It is becoming dearer and dearer to run any kind of vehicle in the countryside here, while there is a near lack of public transport in most places.
The trouble with the fifteen minute city idea is that physical facilities are gone in many cases and replaced by online ones. We don't consider doctors to be "commercial usage" here yet.
Also, events and actions were close to how reality unfolded with simplified cast of characters, basically.
The dialogs and characters are completely unrealistic and made me cringe. Everyone looks overemotional and infantile.
The hierarchical interactions are comical - a minister would never go to talk to miners, he would just phone a subordinate and tell them to organize people, they don't need armed soldiers present to enforce something, it is not the Wild West. The authors have no clue about the soviet mentality and how soviet society operated.
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...
"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...
And to nitpick: INSAG-7 doesn't disagree with INSAG-1 about the power rising just before AZ-5. From page 8 of INSAG-7: "When the turbine was tripped, the four pumps it was powering began to slow down as the turbine speed was reduced and the associated generator voltage fell. This reduced rate of core flow caused the void content of the core to rise and caused an initial positive feedback of reactivity which was at least in part the cause of the acci- dent." (page 8) This happens ~30 seconds before AZ-5 is pushed.
The same event described in Table I on page 21-22 of INSAG-1, with the part deprecated by INSAG-7 marked with {}:
01:23:04 {The personnel blocked the two-TG trip signal.} Emergency stop valve to the turbine was closed. The reactor continues operating at a power of 200 MW(th).
01:23:10 One group of automatic control rods start driving out
01:23:21 Two groups of automatic control rods begin reinsertion.
01:23:31 Net reactivity increasing with subsequent slow increase in reactor power.
01:23:40 Operator pushes AZ-5 button (reactor trip).
The textual description on page 25 of INSAG-1 isn't much different: "When the emergency stop valve to the turbine was closed, the steam pressure began to rise. The flow through the core started to drop because four of the main cooling pumps were running down with the generator. Increasing pressure, reduced feedwater flow and reduced flow through the reactor are competing factors which determine the volumetric steam quality and hence the power of the reactor. It should be emphasized that the reactor was then in such a state that small changes in power would have led to much larger changes in steam void, with consequent power increases. The combination of these factors ultimately led to a power increase begninning at about 01:23:30."
A scanned copy of INSAG-1: https://ilankelman.org/miscellany/chernobyl.pdf
The Soviet report to IAEA in 1986: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
> neither the reactor power nor the other parameters (pressure and water level in the steam separator drums, coolant and feedwater flow rates, etc.) required any intervention by the personnel or by the engineered safety features from the beginning of the tests until the EPS-5 button was pressed. The Commission did not detect any events or dynamic processes, such as hidden reactor runaway, which could have been the event which initiated the accident. “
This alone sets the tone of a TV show that needs to have clear goodies and baddies, and obviously life is never that simple.
And before someone goes on about cultural difference, there are several high profile examples of American leaders/directors/business men acting in openly abusive ways.
Soviet Union people knew the concept of "non-asshole boss" and could distinguish it from "asshole boss". They would use those terms. Where they could vote for boss (and yes they could vote for boss in some institutions) they would avoid voting for assholes (unless they expected them to be assholes to external people).
This concept existed also in literature, movies, music and general entertainment. It shown up there and the "good boss" always won (else it could be constructed as a critique of the system). Asshole boss was typically foreign ennemy in disguise.
What an out of touch statement.
Have you ever worked in a restaurant or on a construction site?
Nothing the ruling class or their useful idiot cronies does publicly even approaches what's not considered abuse in those contexts.
Nothing even approached the high profile behavior I have in mind.
Your restaurant or construction site just sucked, plainly.
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...
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.
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.
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...
For a long time there was a serious debate over whether wild animals actually experienced aging or not, because they’d never live long enough to get noticeably aged.
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!
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?
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)
However it was still enough to make Germany shut down its working reactors.
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.
It was 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in Henan province in Central China, which is still not much known in the West.
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.
They were different kinds of disasters, but not incomparable in terms of the scope and reach of damage done to the environment. Chernobyl didn't have the situation of dumping incalculable amounts of radioactive water into the Pacific.
That is a very, very misinformed or misleading statement. Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 have half lives of around 30 years and do get into seafood. There are warnings given out often about radioactive contaminated seafood. That's why Fukushima's radioactive water dumping was such a problem and neighboring countries had issues with it.
Seafood can and does get radioactive contamination and this increases cancer risks in humans that consume it.
Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 are examples. They can get into the seafood chain and very much do increase cancer risks.
Different reactions, by different types of governments and politicians. Chernobyl was also seen as an European problem, thus numerous other nations and organizations were more significantly involved.
With Fukushima, the government and companies involved had greater control over the flow of allowed information and reporting. For instance, Korea was greatly concerned about Fukushima, but could do little to intervene or interfere with internal Japanese affairs.
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.
"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...