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Comment by aledevv | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_dose

In addition to that, if a quarter of animals die prematurely from some horrible disease, that’s just Tuesday. People tend to get upset when that happens among humans.

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.

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!

That sounds quite accurate. The average lifespan of a feral cat in the wild is said to be a year or two. Much shorter than the domestic equivalent.

He didn't say that though. He said many species are living quite happily, but nature has also changed, sometimes for the worse

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