Regardless of the arguments about radiation, it seems pretty clear that lack of humans is really the most important thing for animals to flourish.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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...
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!
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.
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. “
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...
Also, events and actions were close to how reality unfolded with simplified cast of characters, basically.
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?
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.
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.
It was 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in Henan province in Central China, which is still not much known in the West.
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.
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)
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...