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Chernobyl Area Survey Finds Lasting Problems For Wildlife
ninguna writes "The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. While some stories seem to indicate nature is recovering, the actual picture isn't quite so great."
Purely a question of risk tolerance. The "forcibly expelling your innards out of both ends of your digestive track within hours or days" levels of radiation were mostly confined to a fairly small area around the reactor(or especially unlucky downwind areas when it was on fire) and are largely gone. I still wouldn't set up camp inside the sarcophagus, next to the big pile of still-quite-zesty mixed fuel and melted containment; but the exclusion zone is a much larger area.
There are already some inhabitants, mostly stubborn old people who didn't want to leave their villages and either didn't believe in the seriousness of the threat or considered their deaths from natural causes to be fairly close at hand anyway. They aren't growing third arms or anything.
I suspect that any attempt to repopulate the area would generate upticks in unusual childhood cancers, birth defects, and chromosomal abnormalities that would make an epidemiologist cringe; but that a self-supporting human population would be totally doable. Consider, for example, how people lived before antibiotics. Mortality from bacterial disease on a scale that would horrify a modern first world observer; but, at a population level, people kept plugging right along. Living in the exclusion zone would probably be rather similar; but with cancer and such instead of infection. Rates that would be considered wildly unacceptable; but would fall well below those required to actually render the population nonviable....
I am not too informed about the radiation levels and how they work, but I have some curiosity about how this compares to the spots where the A-bombs where dropped in Japan during WWII. Are those areas populated again? If so, how long did it take for them to be habitable again? Or is this a whole different level of radiation and thus incomparable?/
The radiation levels here are much worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, partially due to the fact that those were comparatively small airborn detonations. That means that the radioactive byproducts were mainly spread by wind to a large area. My impression also is that meltdowns produce more dirty products than deliberate detonations, but I'm not sure. Whatever the reasons, Nagasaki was safe enough to have rebuilding begin shortly after the war, and the same was true of Hiroshima. Both are once again, large, functioning cities. Radiation levels remaining are almost statistically negligible.
Minor nit: you should probably write out Iodine the first time you use it instead of abbreviating it. The d**n sans-serif fonts used on many websites including this one makes a capital i indistinguishable from a lowercase L, so when I read your post, I was completely and utterly baffled for about two minutes before it hit me that it was a capital i. *smashes head into desk*.
On a lighter note, if I could go back in time and prevent one person from being born, it would be the inventor of the first sans serif typeface.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The excellent photo-journal of this girl who rides her motorcycle within the dead zone will answer all your questions, and then some.
Basically, the official dead zone is a much larger area than you think, and even within the dead zone there are various degrees of risk/safety to consider. The old people that have come back are basically farmers, from the various pictures she took. And even then, if someone were to bring them food, the risk wouldn't be the same for someone who's only driving by and someone who's actually living there.