Life After Chernobyl __HOT__
A team of international researchers, including James Beasley, assistant professor of wildlife ecology at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School Forestry and Natural Resources, found that despite the high levels of radiation, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is teeming with moose, roe deer, wild boar and wolves.
Life After Chernobyl
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This may come as a surprise to many, especially since much of the imagery from Chernobyl depicts a barren wasteland of crumbling buildings, abandoned schoolyards and roadways overrun with vegetation. Indeed, some previous studies in the 1,621-square-mile site showed evidence of major radiation effects and significantly reduced populations of wildlife.
Beasley also led another study in which scientists used remote cameras to observe wildlife populations at 94 different sites in the exclusion zone. The motion-activated cameras were attached to trees for seven days at each location, where researchers also placed bait to attract nearby animals.
An abandoned village inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. An exclusion zone was created by the Soviet government after the Chernobyl nuclear accident on April 26, 1986, of 30 kilometers radius around the exploded power plant. At the time, 116 thousand people were evacuated and transferred to the outskirts of the big cities. The area was too contaminated to allow the population to live there. But some, about 1200 people, decided that life in cities was not for them, too difficult to survive with poor wages and without the products of the garden. And above all too strong the bond with their land to abandon it forever.After few months of forced evacuation they came back to live in their homes, challenging the ban of Soviet government. Some of them even never went away. Today less than 200 people remain of the 1200 returned to live in the area shortly after 1986, time and radiations have taken them away.
An abandoned house in the village of Paryshev, inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Today the last survivors are very elderly. When the last of them will die, the culture of the villages of the province of Polessie, with their history, traditions and customs will end forever. Memory will disappear because radiation does not just erase life, but also history. They are the last witnesses of the lost places, lost forever.The few inhabited villages of the exclusion zone will disappear permanently, and homes and personal belongings, which have accompanied them all their lives, will be swallowed up by vegetation and destroyed by time. Like the house of Nikolai and Anastasia in Parishev. Nikolai died two years ago and his son took his mother Anastasia away from the area to live with him in Kiev, to not leave her alone. Now their home is abandoned, the vegetation and time is consuming everything. What remains is a picture hanged on the wall, a faded portrait of Nikolai and Anastasia, sitting side by side on the bed, the only remaining memory of their lives in that house,
The forest burns behind the ghost city of Pripyat. One of the greatest dangers existing in the exclusion zone are fires. Fire burns trees raising radioactive ash that is spread in the air, causing a new nuclear fallout. The town of Pripyat is located three kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear plant. 50 thousand people lived there, and were evacuated two days after the explosion. The people were forced to leave behind everything except for their documents. Today Pripyat is a ghost town and will remain forever a ghost town.
local bar in Radinka. Radinka is a highly contaminated village located 300 meters from the border with the Chernobyl exclusion zone. After the incident in the Chernobyl power plant a 30 km radius exclusion zone was created by artificially dividing the province of Polessie (province of northern Ukraine) and positioning the village of Radinka in zone 4 of radioactive contamination, the area with less contamination, despite the high contamination levels. Thirty years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, Radinka and the other villages in Ivankov province are the example of what there is around the Chernobyl exclusion zone: a highly contaminated and inhabited area, totally forgotten.From the studies carried out by Professor Bandazhevsky 80% of the over 3700 children examined, and who live in these lands on the border with the exclusion zone, have heart rhythm disorders, directly related to the amount of cesium incorporated. Furthermore, 30% have an internal contamination from cesium 137 above 50 Bq / kg, a level in which all pathologies develop.
Tourist while taking a souvenir photo holding the skull of a cow, chernobyl exclusion zone. Since 2011, the year in which the Ukrainian government has opened the door of the exclusion zone to the tourists' visit, about 90,000 people a year cross the radiation border. There are now dozens of tour operators from Kiev organizing the all-inclusive "Chernobyl tour", a day in the most significant places of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Tourists come from all over the world: US, Europe, Australia, Japan, South America, with the most different reasons: fans of abandoned places, or tourists of extreme places, people interested in history or to see with their own eyes the consequences of a nuclear accident. Or just curious. Today tourism in this new Pompeii has become fundamental. It helps the local economy, 90,000 people a year, are not few for a place that would have to be abandoned and forbidden. Here the nuclear amusement park works well, so well that the Ukrainian government plans to bring the number of tourists to one million a year.
The following summarizes the health assessments published in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 2008 Report titled Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident and the UNSCEAR 2018 White Paper titled Evaluation of data on thyroid cancer in regions affected by the Chernobyl accident. The findings in these reports are based on approximately 30 years of studies of the health consequences of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. UNSCEAR acknowledges that thyroid cancer after the Chernobyl accident is a major issue and that further investigation is needed to determine the long-term consequences.
When iodine-131 is released into the environment, it is quickly transferred to humans and taken up by the thyroid gland. However, I-131 has a short half-life (8 days). Children exposed to radioactive iodine usually receive higher doses than adults, because their thyroid gland is smaller and they have a higher metabolism.
Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, as of 2015 there had been almost 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident. Approximately 5,000 of these thyroid cancers are likely attributable to children drinking fresh milk containing radioactive iodine from cows who had eaten contaminated grass in the first few weeks following the accident. The remaining 15,000 cases are due to a variety of factors, such as increased spontaneous incidence rate with aging of the population, awareness of thyroid cancer risk after the accident, and improved diagnostic methods to detect thyroid cancer.
The latest report from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effect of Atomic Radiation found 134 first responders who were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome (ARS) after the Chernobyl accident. Of these, 28 died in the first four months, but not instantaneously. Then 19 more died over the next 20 years. But the majority of these survived and lived a long life after that. There were no cases of ARS among the general public living in cities and villages around the Chernobyl power plant.
More importantly, we have the study of atomic bomb survivors in Japan, which tracked a very large group of people over a long time. Atomic bomb survivors and Chernobyl cleanup workers were exposed to the same kind of radiation, so the findings from Japanese survivors could shed some light on the expected effects after the Chernobyl accident. The study of atomic bomb survivors did not show any increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes among children of survivors, nor there were any indications of hereditary effects.
We conducted two studies of thyroid conditions in children who lived at the time of the Chernobyl accident in affected areas in Ukraine and Belarus. We confirmed that the particular type of radiation in Chernobyl, radioactive iodine, could cause thyroid cancer. Unexpectedly, we also showed that radiation to the thyroid gland from ingesting radioactive iodine within two months after the Chernobyl accident by children and adolescents could lead to development of non-cancer thyroid diseases, such as thyroid follicular adenoma, thyroid benign nodules, and hypothyroidism.
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. Nineteen more workers subsequently died between 1987 and 2004, but their deaths cannot necessarily be attributed to radiation exposured. Nobody offsite suffered from acute radiation effects although a significant, but uncertain, fraction of the thyroid cancers diagnosed since the accident in patients who were children at the time are likely to be due to intake of radioactive iodine falloutm,9. Furthermore, large areas of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and beyond were contaminated in varying degrees. See also sections below and Chernobyl Accident Appendix 2: Health Impacts. 041b061a72