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.”

Comments

Save the rainforest

[MouseR]

With just a couple of nukes!

Re:Save the rainforest

[Tablizer]

Space critters: "Humanize it from orbit just to make sure."

Re:Save the rainforest

[KGIII]

There are a couple of interesting documentaries on the subject. PBS did Radioactive Wolves and another is Chernobyl Wolfpack from National Geographic. The PBS production is actually quite well done. The second isn't bad but it's not my favorite. They make for interesting viewing for those who are interested. I believe they can both be found on YouTube.

The Message

[Mr D from 63]

The message is that the real risk of radioactive exposure has been greatly overblown. What is happening (or not happening ) in the Chernobly area is only a surprise to those who believe the anti nuke agenda driven FUD.

Re:The Message

[MouseR]

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.

Re:The Message

[HiThere]

Well, there *is* evidence, but it's hardly conclusive. And how do you rate bacteria?

OTOH, IIRC there's evidence that rats preferentially avoid areas high in radiation, so perhaps the evidence that exists needs to have behavioral changes factored into it (unless you want to consider that a part of how they avoid damage).

Yes, the effects show up sooner. This means they are more quickly eliminated from the genepool, so theoretically it makes sense.

OTOH, when last I visited the topic the evidence was quite weak. So what I'm talking about is science that's probably 40 years old, and wasn't strong then. Is there anything more recent?

Re: Ban ALL NUKES NOW

[jklovanc]

Three Mile Island was 1979 and Chernobyl was 1986. Don't you think technology has advances in 30 years. Even Fukushima is minor compared to the number of people killed by emissions from coal plants. The difference is when nuclear goes bad the damage can be very big. People get used to a few thousand extra people dying every month due to coal plant emissions.

It all makes sense...

[gfxguy]

If we'd just stop inhabiting the planet, hunting, and farming, then the other animals would be better off! Who'd have thought?

Fukushima factoid

[Firethorn]

While Fukushima was the latest accident, I always like to point out that the Fukushima plant is actually older than TMI, by at least by a few months, depending on how you measure it - do you start the time when construction started, or when criticality was first achieved?

Modern, actual modern nuclear plants would be far safer.

And yes, Coal power kills more people any given day than Nuclear does all decade.

I'd really like to see a high-efficiency high temperature molten salt thorium reactor deployed.

Re:Fukushima factoid

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:what KIND of wildlife?

[circletimessquare]

chernobyl is actually in ukraine, just outside belarus

it was a soviet disaster (although the soviet union was merely a construct of russian imperialism, so it can be thought of as a russian disaster, so perhaps i'm just tweaking the meaning of your joke)

but like the holodomor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), and the continuing vivisection of east ukraine and crimea, russians sure do treat their slavic brothers like shit

It's not the only example

[Anonymous Coward]

Bikini atoll, devastated by a nuclear blast is in great shape, thanks mainly to the lack of people :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3339485/Marine-life-flourishes-at-Bikini-Atoll-test-site.html
And certainly in much better conditions compared to Indonesia or the Philippines reefs with no radiation and huge populations.

Another example is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, apparently with great wildlife. Again, because of the lack of
people.

In the rest of the world, while the human population has doubled from 3.5 B to 7B in only 40years, the wildlife (both marine and non) has halved :
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26290-worlds-wildlife-population-halved-in-just-40-years.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/half-marine-life-lost-in-40-years/6779912

Even the relatively protected Great Barrier Reef has halved its cover in 27 years :
http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Full-PNAS-paper-for-publication.pdf

incomplete sentence...

[Lumpy]

It's not farming, building and hunting that hurts the animal population. it's doing it in MASS QUANTITIES from overpopulation.

The american indians managed the land and it's resources just fine, It's the assholes from europe that wiped out most everything because of stupidity.

Just like how the Wolf population crashed horribly due to idiot farmers killing every wolf they see because they are too lazy to protect their livestock properly.

Re:incomplete sentence...

[Antique Geekmeister]

There is some uncertainty about the extinction of North American megafauna. Human migrations to North America tended to occur during climate change, so which was the cause and with the effect of human migration and of extinction is a fascinating question.

The destruction of the Nazca native American civilization due to overfarming and damming of rivers for agricultural control, coupled with unexpected floods, is very convincing.

Re:incomplete sentence...

[Solandri]

The american indians managed the land and it's resources just fine, It's the assholes from europe that wiped out most everything because of stupidity.

They didn't manage the land and its resources. They lived a nomadic lifestyle. Once they'd depleted an area of its resources, they simply picked up everything and moved somewhere else. This had the effect of distributing their environmental impact.

That only works so long as population density is very low. Europeans arrived with a much higher population density. They would've had the same detrimental effect on the North American environment even if they'd lived as the native Americans did.

Re:incomplete sentence...

[drinkypoo]

They didn't manage the land and its resources. They lived a nomadic lifestyle. Once they'd depleted an area of its resources, they simply picked up everything and moved somewhere else.

Who told you that? Because they lied to you. First, there was substantial variation in lifestyle. Second, they didn't just deplete an area and then move. They practiced land management, and they had the land portioned up into different groups' territories. In the west, they lived in relative stasis, and in the same places, for over ten thousand years. They successfully managed forests (with yearly controlled burns), oyster beds (by not overcollecting from them) and fish stocks (by not overfishing.) Their yearly burns kept the oaks and redwoods healthy, by clearing the understory. The oaks provided more food than they could eat every year. Then whitey arrived, in the form of Andrew Kelsey, who enslaved, raped, and murdered the locals. Some of them understandably got upset and killed him. Then we sent the US 1st Cavalry up here to murder all the Pomo on Bo-no-po-ti, aka "Island Village". Literally only one girl survived, hiding in the reeds while the lake went red with blood. Later, the federal government paid the locals $1/tree to plant black walnuts, as motivation to chop down the oaks upon which the natives depended for food, oaks in healthy forests that they had maintained literally for millenia. The walnuts were never financially beneficial to the area, and few remain today.

In the Midwest, the natives deliberately burned forests to create more range land for the bison. The bison then maintained the land in a state suitable for their use, which left the bison suitable for the use of the natives. The natives would follow the bison herds, since that was their primary source of all things.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the natives of the East.

Now, to be fair, if you go down and check out the natives of Mexico, they were eating one another, and they deforested the shit out of their land and they ran out of food and they migrated or they died. But up here in North America, the natives most certainly did practice sustainable land management.

Europeans arrived with a much higher population density. They would've had the same detrimental effect on the North American environment even if they'd lived as the native Americans did.

We'll never know, because they didn't even try. They did the opposite. They deliberately destroyed the lifestyle of the natives. They killed all the bison, a free renewable resource, so that they could carve the land up into fenced portions that someday, nobody would want to live on anyway. Seriously, do you think they would have killed the bison if they knew that someday all that territory would be known as "the flyover states", just a bunch of shitholes with poor civil rights? And they deforested the shit out of the west so that they could run cattle here! All they had to do to have more cattle than we could use was not kill all the bison at once.

Was there any doubt?

[gurps_npc]

Once there was a creature called the Short Nosed Bear.

They weighed on average 900 kilograms - basically 2000 lbs. The largest of them were over 12 feet tall. - more than twice my height. They could reach up and grab things 14 ft above the ground. They could run over 40 mph. On all fours, were still taller than men.

They ate meat. Humans are made of meat.

Humans lived in the same place as the Short Nosed Bear. Humans that didn't have bows and arrows, let alone guns. Just spears. With rock points.

Humans probably didn't intentionally kill the S.N.B. - we just killed all it's food, and let them starve.

Humans: The most terrifying killing machine Earth has ever seen. Nothing is worse than a human.

Re: Ban ALL NUKES NOW

[HiThere]

TMI suffered an endogenous problem, not an external insult. The two cases aren't comparable, but if I were comparing them I'd rate TMI as worse, because it caused problems with far less provocation. And I've no reason to believe that it would have caused less damage if inundated by an earthquake followed by a tsunami.