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Wildlife Defies Chernobyl Radiation
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that wildlife has reappeared in the Chernobyl region even with high levels of radiation. Populations of animals both common and rare have increased substantially and there are tantalizing reports of bear footprints and confirmed reports of large colonies of wild boars and wolves. These animals are radioactive but otherwise healthy. A large number of animals died initially due to problems like destroyed thyroid glands but their offspring seem to be physically healthy. Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste. The article includes some controversial statements recommending disposal of nuclear waste in tropical forests to keep forest land away from greedy developers and farmers"
thats great about the wildlife , its a shame the same couldnt be said about the children and their offspring for generations to come, of course we need more power stations because they are the cheapest form of power, right ?
They have only whitnessed this over how many generations? I would imagine with every offspring, you have a handful more mutations. After a while, you have oatmeal.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
He has found ample evidence of DNA mutations, but nothing that affected the animals' physiology or reproductive ability. "Nothing with two heads," he says.
It's as if the positive changes are being selected in favor of the negative changes.
Hmm.. increasing mutation rates where they are already sky-high, as opposed to the conventional wisdom of minimizing exposure.
It's like adding nature to nature. I like it.
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Leaking tanks of high-level bombmaking waste have made a huge area undevelopable. The animals are pleased as punch with this state of affairs.
It's not hard to imagine many of the conceptions about radiation exposure may have been a bit over estimated, simply because nobody has really been willing to undergo an experiment of that caliber. I would not believe the animals are enjoying their radiation poisoning however until I was able to ask them.
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that human presence is more hazardous to wildlife than radiation.
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Most rain forest is inhabited. The article makes the usual stupid urban-centric assumptions about where the people we care about live. Maybe someone should suggest the waste needs to be buried in parks in the author's neighborhood (not really).
I still think the Sun is the best pace to dispose of the longer half-life (>100 yrs as very very unsafe) stuff.
Well, a lot of animals have life cycles under a year. Even bears don't often live past 20, right? And they become sexually mature and reproduce within a few years. The radiation wouldn't interrupt the life of short-lived animals.
So, not everyone living in an irradiated area will have their flesh falling off, but for us long-lifed humans, the life would be filled with more misery and an early ending. Maybe cancer at 20. And for normal human socities, "old farts" (those over 30) are really what drive the society.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Sure they can reproduce but I wouldn't exactly be jumping with glee over this "recovery". The damage merely has yet to express itself.
So what you're saying is, regardless of the lack of evidence for harmful mutation that should be evident, there MUST be harm becase you KNOW that radiation causes it?
Way to be scientific about this.
So why are we surprised that any of this is happening?
"Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction"
...
That to me sounds as an opportunity for an evolution leap. Most mutations will be bad and disappear eventually, but there is this slight chance that few others will be beneficial for the species and eventually dominate. I wouldn't be surprised if few hundrend years from now we end up with "Bear Chernobilus" that hibernates only half the time and has double the mating seasons
It's always struck me how "keep-out" zones like toxic waste areas (farm irrigation drains for instance, see Kesterson) and military bases have become wildlife refuges, simply for the reason that the public isn't allowed in to bother the wildlife or build. The best coral reef diving in the world? Bikini Atoll.
Actually, at geosync orbit altitudes, the earth's escape velocity is ~4.3km/s. And you gain a good deal of orbital velocity (~3km/s) when going up a space elevator, which can be converted into escape velocity. So you only really need a delta-v of ~1.3km/s to escape earth's gravity once you're at the top of a space elevator (compared to ~11km/s from earth's surface).
The earth's ~30km/s velocity in orbit around the sun has no real impact on this scenario. Once you hit earth's escape velocity, you're effectively free of earth's gravity and into the domain of the sun's gravity. You'll get to the sun eventually as long as you don't hit something else first, or accelerate far more to beyond the sun's ~43km/s escape velocity, and I don't suppose it really matters how long it takes waste to reach the sun once it's on trajectory.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
in fact, the offspring are pretty much normal.
The offspring you find in the wild is pretty normal. Of course, just about all offspring that does exhibit deleterious phenotypic expression die very quickly, and is in most cases spontaneously aborted long before birth. Most species can produce a lot more offspring than actually survive to adulthood (and most species do usually produce slightly more, as a hedge), so dramatically higher infant mortality or aborted pregnancies would just be compensated for by having more pregnancies and larger klutches in the first place. Of course, to some extent the mortality is lowered by the lack of human activities. You could hypothesize a donut-shaped overall mortality graph with the senter around the reactor and the outer edge at the edge of normal human habitation. Near the center you'd have high mortality from the radiation effects, and high mortality in human-habitated areas, but in between there'd be a sweet spot, with just a small increase in radiation mortality completely swamped by the lack of humans.
In fact, it would be really interesting to see a study of klutch size among birds nesting at the plant compared to the same species at various distances away from the area.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
That's good to know, but regardless of whether she's 26 or 30, or whether she rode a motorbike or a Jeep, the real question is whether or not the photos in the photo-essay are authentic. I've been reading through it and by and large I think the text is far less interesting and compelling than the photos.
Anybody have any clue as to the authenticity of the photos?
(Particularly, since we're talking about the wildlife in this thread, the ones of the mutant animals? Which she admits are not hers.)
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But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
An excellent point, one that I think can't be said enough. While we're burying all this nuclear waste, or tossing it down into the Marianas Trench, or whatever, I think it's important to consider that while the storage method should be able to last as long as the longest-lived dangerous isotopes in the waste (in case we just want to leave it there) it should also have as a design criteria the ability for us to recover it.
I could easily envision a time in the future, a lot sooner than 10,000 years or even a few hundred, when we might want to get at some of that "waste" in order to reprocess it in ways that are not economically viable, or perhaps technologically feasible, right now.
This is hugely the case with the type of nuclear energy we use in the United States, where the majority of the fuel rods are comprised of U-238 and only a small percentage of it is U-235, the latter is the fissionable fuel, the former isn't (although it can be bred into Plutonium) and currently we really just use it as a sort of contaminant in order to make weaponization of the fuel difficult. A change in attitudes regarding breeder reactors would instantly make U-238, particularly the stuff that comes out of reactors (which has greater-than-trace amounts of plutonium in it already) a hot commodity. (No pun intended.)
Frankly given our energy requirements, I think the need to reprocess nuclear fuel waste may occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within a few centuries or even decades, depending on technological developments of other energy sources and the geopolitics of Uranium mining, and thus the solutions for waste storage that are recoverable while also being secure are the best ones.
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there MUST be harm becase you KNOW that radiation causes it?
Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree, but I would posit that being radioactive and having large portions of your DNA damaged could be classified by reasonable people as "harm". Just because you don't understand the way in which every piece of DNA functions does not mean that everything is fine.
It's a good thing there are so many people who disagree though. I think they should be allowed to move in to the restricted zone. I have no objection to your becoming radioactive, nor do I object to the wholesale modification of your DNA.
It would work if it wasn't $20,000/lb or whatever. I don't think radioactive waste will affect us from 93 million miles away.
reply:
Uhm, the Earth is nice and habitable and well lit (for about half the day at most latitudes) because of waste products from a nuclear event. That event happens in a place about 93 million miles away. If the earth lacked it's electromagnetic field and ozone layer we'd be toast right quick double-time like. The sun puts out a boatload of hazardous emissions, and more than a lethal dosage reaches the earth.
Now, a few thousand (or even million) tons of radioactive waste added to the sun's output wouldn't likely to be noticed due to the overwheleming output of the sun (like lighting a candle outdoors at noon on a cloudless day on top of a snow covered mountain.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
You're calling building a space elevator trivial? Damn, what do you consider hard?
reply:
FTL travel.
Time travel.
Raising of the dead.
Understanding women.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I think your argument would be better if you could cite some of your sources (the parent post had couple of links to support his/her point). I guess I could just google it but how do I know I'm looking at the same sources that you used to make your argument?
Also, pictures of deformed babies don't really support your argument either way except to include emotional aspect to this argument. Deformed babies are born everyday. What I think would be important is the number of deformed babies and type of deformalities compared to "normal" population.
To give a reliable overview, you'd have to track ALL the animals there and observe the population. Here is what you would find:
Some die instantly at the blast.
Some die within the next hours.
Some die within the next days/weeks/months.
Fertility goes DOWN, but those THAT have offspring will have a higher chance to raise them to maturity (less competition).
Again, of those some will die due to mutation.
Some will have a shorter life expectance. As long as they mature and can raise at least one generation of offspring, it's not so important.
Also keep in mind that quite a few animals CAN only raise one generation of offspring, they die after giving birth/laying eggs.
Bottom line, of course animals will survive, as a group. Humans would too, the body count would be incredibly high and the chance that YOU, as an individual, survive, is incredibly small. But as a species, you can fairly reliably survive a nuking.
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Could it be? Could there be natural selection at work? Could evolution actually be right? God's gonna be very angry when he hears about this!
Uninformed and Inaccurate Alarmism, by Michael Crichton?
It used to be that people would use "suspension of disbelief" to immerse themselves into a story.
Now it seems like everyone is in need of "suspension of suspension of disbelief." Since when did it become fashonable to read fiction and believe all the hype therein?
If you read Dan Brown and take him as an authority on biblical history and truth and you read Crichton and ridicule him for bending the truth to support his FICTION you might need to take a step back from the novel you are reading and have a healthy dose of reality. Suspension of disbelief should end when the covers are closed.
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