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Study Finds Humans Are Worse Than Radiation For Chernobyl Animals
derekmead writes: A study published today in Current Biology shows that wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is actually more abundant than it was before the disaster. According to the authors, led by Portsmouth University professor of environmental science Jim Smith, the recovery is due to the removal of the single biggest pressure on wildlife—humans. "The wildlife at Chernobyl is very likely better than it was before the accident, not because radiation is good for animals, but because human occupation is much worse,” Portsmouth University professor of environmental science Jim Smith says. “We were trying to emphasize that this study is a remarkable illustration of an obvious, but important message,” he said. “It is ordinary human habitation and use (farming, forestry, hunting) of land which does most ecological damage.”
I dont think it's overblown. But humans tend to live longer than most wild animals and thus makes us more fragile to the continuing radiated environment.
Short-lived creatures and short gestation does tend to favour the critters.
If we'd just stop inhabiting the planet, hunting, and farming, then the other animals would be better off! Who'd have thought?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
By what standard?
The usual, mean time between expected accidents, radiation releases, etc... We're talking about an order of magnitude or two longer times.
By some ironic quirk TMI *is* one of the safest designs because it was designed to be resistant to aircraft impacts
Actually, it wasn't. It's just a quirk that a giant concrete pressure dome like what the USA and the rest of the sane world puts around nuclear reactors happens to sneer at plane impacts.
Coal and Nuclear are as bad as each other but for different reasons. Nuclear kills people for subsequent decades as the radioactive effluents make their way through our water and food supply, it also reduces the birth rate because pregnancies fail to come to full term. The key thing is it happens very slowly and the majority of effects are still years away as opposed to coal whose effects are almost instantaneous in comparison.
"radioactive effluents"? You do realize that nuclear reactors don't release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions? Major releases are on the order of once a decade or more, and that's with our aging GenII reactors, world wide. GenIII would be a lot safer.
Also, citation on the birth rates. Citation on "majority of effects" being still years away - if anything we should be recovering from the effects of post WWII above ground nuclear bomb tests.
From my understanding of this technology it's spent fuel product is 233 Thallium, IIRC, which is characterized by many daughter products with short half lives. I'm not saying it isn't better reactor technology however it would seem the central issue of current reactor technology, the long term storage of spent fuel products, is an issue for thorium reactor technology as well.
Question, do you know what "short half lives" amounts to? It means that the material in question is much more radioactive - but that means it also decays in radioactivity much faster. Something with a half-life of 10 days will be virtually entirely gone within a year. Something with a half-life in the decades will still be churning a century from now, but it's initially safer to be around.(Safer being a relative quality).
Until we have effective, geologically stable and appropriate spent fuel containment facilities then we will always have higher levels of risk with greater levels of impact as a result of accidents in the nuclear industry. For that reason it's important to reduce that level of risk and impact to the community regardless of what reactor technology is deployed.
Above ground caskets are working well. I figure that we'd be digging up anything we bury within a century to reprocess it anyways. Heck, let it sit in a cask for 40 years and so much of the 'hot' stuff has decayed that it should make reprocessing significantly cheaper.
I don't read AC A human right