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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"
We're fine until we have confirmed reports of colonies of large wild boars and wolves
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
I recall a certain knight... a black one... who expressed similar optimism in the face of suffering personal maladies.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
Not all damage to DNA from radiation is harmful. Cells have repair systems and can quickly repair breaks in DNA, with no long-term cellular consequence. Alternatively, the repair may not return the DNA to its original form, but may retain its integrity. If cellular damage is not repaired, it may prevent the cell from surviving or reproducing, or it may result in a viable but modified cell. These two outcomes have different results, leading either to deterministic or stochastic effects [Court of Appeals, 1999, pp. 37, 38].
Source: http://www.yuccamountain.org/price003.htm
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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"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."
Ummm... the animals are radioactive and their DNA has undergone considerable mutation. What exactly is contrary here to the common assumptions of radiological contamination? Sure matches my own assumptions.
Sure they can reproduce but I wouldn't exactly be jumping with glee over this "recovery". The damage merely has yet to express itself.
Though if any of the local turtles grow to human size and start dressing like ninjas, I'll take back everything I said.
A former Soviet Republic has developed Radioactive Bears?
Someone get Stephen Colbert on the phone right away! The world must be warned!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I am not that surprised really, that is what natural selection is about. The DNA coding for many genes also has quite a bit of redundancy built in, naturally with large radiation doses critical genes may be damaged, but given enough time favourable mutants will arise.
It reminds me of the large scale experiments done on plant breeding [1] where radioactive material was placed in the centre of a field of crops, and favourable mutants were selected. I love telling this story to anti-GE people, who probably eat plant products produced as a result of these experiments done predominantly in the 1970's. At least with GE only a single well studied change is being made.
[1] http://www.nias.affrc.go.jp/eng/gfs/index.html
This story was covered in this months (last months now? the next issue is due soon) National Geographic. Definately one of the better featured pieces of the last few months
FGD 135
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
I took classes from a professor studying worms and spiders in the Chernobyl area, and he found remarkable genetic mutations (e.g., changes in the number and size of chromosomes, large sections of additional DNA, etc.) and behavioral changes (e.g., worms switching to from asexual to sexual reproduction).
Since these organisms have such short lifespans, there have been ample generations since the nuclear accident for the organisms to go locally extinct or mutate into different species. But, that has not been the case. These local populations have continued to survive without deleterious effects on the population level.
Populations of organisms with longer lifespans may take longer to recover to pre-blast levels (although from the sound of the article and my previous knowledge the opposite has occurred) and may experience a genetic bottleneck effect (which may be countered by mutations), but genomes are resiliant and it is unlikely that the populations would never recover.
from a few weeks ago. They didn't breed those in Europe; they just caught a few Chernobyl ones. They would have got a bear too, but those things move amazingly fast on all eights.
I highly doubt this has anything to do with mother nature adapting in a relatively short period of time. Stuff like that is for comic books. Radiation levels, while still incredibly unhealthy, have dropped considerably.
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I would imagine animals and plantlife are not thriving or living as well as they should be. Radiation levels in outlaying areas have probbaly dropped to levels that allow life to screw faster then it is consumed by disease and cancer.
Heck people that lived in the chemical waste dump of Love Canal could still have kids... but in a toxic situation like that you're gon'a have a flipper baby or two, and life expectancy is going to be fairly bad.
This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/jou
But who knows, perhaps radiation has produced a race of super bears which are immune to nuclear weapons. If so, someone should notify Steven Colbert.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
So why are we surprised that any of this is happening?
You're calling building a space elevator trivial? Damn, what do you consider hard?
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
That's the sound of the joke going over your head :)
It is known (although ignored in strict radiation regulations) that the same dose received in short time is much more harmful than the dose received during longer times. It is probably because the cells have repair mechanism that can cope with small damage over long time while cannot efectively repair large damage in short time. There are even indications that small doses can be beneficial by "training" the repair mechanism.
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Dr. Ian Malcolm: I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
(Can anyone guess the Movie or Book title?)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Of course uranium is a natural source of energy. All sources of energy are natural. For that matter, so is petroleum, which also has to be refined in order to be useful. Or perhaps you meant "renewable", which for the most part is just enviro-speak for "solar energy". Besides, if we reinstitute the breeder-reactor program, nuclear power is also pretty damn renewable.
... if handled as badly as the Russians did it is an unmitigated disaster. Contrast that with the Three Mile Island event, which did in fact melt a lot of equipment but so far as nuclear accidents go was a success because containment wasn't breached. Yes yes, there was a minor release of gas but the two events cannot be compared in terms of severity, no matter how much some people want to. Besides, the French seem to be doing a substantially better job with their nuclear program, which just goes to show that the bulk of the concerns about nuclear power (at least in the U.S.) are politico-economic more than technological.
... and you can never have that, not when dealing with the energy levels a high-tech civilization requires. As an engineer I can tell you this much: everything is a trade-off. Everything is: it is the nature of our reality. A trade-off is a decision, a balancing act between the costs, risks and benefits of different approaches to solving a problem. In this case, by choosing to not develop nuclear power to any useful degree we are choosing to go down a different path, one which also has serious consequences. As fossil-fuels go, coal isn't exactly safe you know, and supplies of fuel oil and natural gas will continue to be uncertain for the foreseeable future. At some point in the not-too-distant future we will have to make a decision, whether we want to or not.
The problem with nuclear energy is not that it can be unsafe. Of course it can
The problem is that society wants an absolute, iron-clad guarantee that a particular technology is safe
You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too, at least not in the context of our current technology.
Sure, you can promote tidal power, wind power, solar power or {insert favorite alternative energy source here}. If such a source is going to generate enough power to significantly offset our use of fossil fuuels it will have economic and environmental impact, probably serious ones. Worse yet, none of them are really energy-dense enough to handle our power needs. Take a typical 2400 megawatt nuclear plant for example. Yes, they are very expensive, but so would be the physical plant required to generate and store enough solar power to provide the same level of service. Regardless, we (for a variety of reasons) may choose to make that investment. But we'd best do it with our eyes open and be willing to accept the downsides of whatever road (or roads) we decide to travel.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's not authorative but apparently Elena's story is a hoax. According to the linked posting she was 30, not 26 at the time of writing and cannot ride a motorbike. According to the thread she is actually a tourguide with Chernobylinterinform. Sorry for ruining the fantasy.
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.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.
Those pictures turned out to be a hoax. The story was covered here.
My wife and I recently went on a tour of the Nevada Test Site when we were in Las Vegas several weeks ago. These tours are arranged by the Department of Energy which outsources them to a private firm. Essentially you ride around on a bus in the Nevada Test Site all day and get a really cool tour of the blast sites, the craters, the house, the rails, etc. Unfortunately the tour does not allow cameras. As for us, we figured we have no plans to ever have any kids anyway and so we signed up for the waiting list. We got in on a cancellation and ended up on a bus full of senior citizens with our tour guide, Ernie, with decades of experience in the atomic testing program. Ernie tended to downplay the safety implications of the testing done on the site. Well, he did mention the leaks and accidents but his voice dropped really low whenever he talked about them... he used the phrase "well, I make no bones about it". Whenever Ernie's voice dropped, you could look out the window and the bus would be passing a fenced area along the side of the road with big scary RADIOACTIVE signs at regular intervals fighting to stay visible above the grass. Ernie was a trip. If you are interested in a tour of the Nevada Test Site go soon while Ernie is still alive to be your tour guide.