Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, booming populations of wolf, elk and other wildlife in the vast contaminated zone in Belarus and Ukraine provide a clue.
On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet Republic, sent clouds of smoldering radioactive material across large swathes of Europe.
Over 100,000 people had to abandon the area permanently, leaving native animals the sole occupants of a cross-border “exclusion zone” roughly the size of Luxembourg.
In the Belarussian part of the zone, tumble-down villages marked with yellow and red radiation warning signs have become hunting grounds for predators such as wolves and hawks, Nest in the roofs and chimneys of abandoned buildings.
The long-term impact of the radiation on animal populations is a subject of intense debate because scientists have struggled to untangle the positive effects of human absence from the negative effects of living in a poisoned environment.
About the zone which encompasses 2,600 sq km (1,000 square miles) of forest, marsh and open countryside, a Ukrainian Ecology Minister, Hanna Vronska disclosed that “People can never live there, it’s impossible, not even for the next 24,000 years’’.
About the zone which encompasses 2,600 sq km (1,000 square miles) of forest, marsh and open countryside, a Ukrainian Ecology Minister, Hanna Vronska disclosed that “People can never live there, it’s impossible, not even for the next 24,000 years’’.
According to a study published in scientific journal Current Biology last October, wolf numbers are over seven times higher in the Belarusian part of the zone compared with uncontaminated areas elsewhere.
Some wolves have taken to straying outside the zone to steal calves from nearby farms, prompting hunters to set traps or shoot them as a deterrent.
International donours have funded the building of a 30,000 tonne “safe confinement” arch to prevent more deadly particles spewing from the stricken nuclear reactor’s site for the next 100 years.
This effort still proves abortive as nothing can be done to decontaminate trees and soil that suffered the worst of the nuclear fallout within a 30-km radius of the plant.
Vronska had earlier disclosed in March that “authorities are considering turning the uninhabitable zone into a biosphere to protect and study its native animal populations in what would be the largest nature reserve in Europe’’.
“There are also plans to use parts of the area to store nuclear waste and for solar power,’’ he said.
The rules of access are also strict on the Ukrainian side, small tour groups can visit sites within the zone, including the “ghost town” of Pripyat.
Also special government permits, usually valid for a few days, are required for anyone wishing to visit the exclusion zone from the Belarussian side.
On the security of this zone, reuters reports that roads going into the zone are guarded to prevent any unauthorised person entering. (Reuters\NAN)