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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.”
With just a couple of nukes!
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
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