Wildlife is Thriving in Chernobyl 35 Years After the Nuclear Explosion (euronews.com) 74
In the absence of humans, the region around Chernobyl is being reclaimed by nature. From a report: 35 years ago a total of 350,000 people were evacuated from the territory after one of humanity's worst nuclear disasters. Ukrainian authorities say the area may not be fit for humans for another 24,000 years. Today, however, it serves as Among the Chernobyl exclusion zone, endangered animals thrive, including the stunning Przewalski's horses. For many decades they were considered the last truly wild horse in the world. In the 1970s they were almost rendered extinct in the wild, but a captive breeding program managed to rescue the species from extinction. Today, several hundred live in the wild in the steppes of Asia and in Europe, but there's also a steadily growing population - to the surprise of many - in Chernobyl. Further reading: Chernobyl alcohol drink seized by authorities.
Wildlife is thriving (Score:1)
But before of the two-headed mutant wild horses!
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Beware the battle cattle!
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With two mouths, their feeding habits take half the time, enabling more for other activities, like reproduction. It's elementary, really!
muatnts will fail the Kentucky Derby drug test! (Score:1)
muatnts will fail the Kentucky Derby drug test!
Re: muatnts will fail the Kentucky Derby drug test (Score:2)
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"before of"? WTF is that?
I'm 99.99532% sure I wrote "beware of".
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"But before of the two-headed mutant wild horses!"
Why do you think the head-count is that high? :-)
They should count the bodies instead.
Yeah, we know. It's more complicated. (Score:1, Insightful)
Great to see that Slashdot finally gets the news from the 90s now!
But since then, we found out that really, there's a lot of mutations, those animals live a lot shorter lives, and generally, they die with ugly cancers in their bodies.
All it actually does, is show us how the world would look like, without *humans* in it. (Okay, minus the deady cancers.)
Turns out, literally deadly radiation is still not even in the same league as what we call our normal human existence.
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I recall hearing that microbes around Chernobyl not doing nearly as well as the macroscopic organisms, with populations only a fraction of what they are elsewhere. And considering that microbes outmass all other life on Earth by something like 30:1 It stands to reason that anything that significantly harms the microbial ecosystem will eventually manifest in the macroscopic one - though perhaps not until it's far to late to try to fix things. Then again, microbial populations can recover incredibly fast, s
Re:Yeah, we know. It's more complicated. (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have a source for that, because what I've heard that between the 1980s and now is that the population of both humans and animals and plants is doing really well, with no excess cancer or increased mutations. There were indeed studies that were reported something like "20-100 mutations per generation" while these science reporters were ignoring the fact that 100 mutations per generation is still considered 'normal' (otherwise we'd never evolve).
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because what I've heard that between the 1980s and now is that the population of both humans and animals and plants is doing really well, with no excess cancer or increased mutations.
That is just plain wrong, sorry.
Google is your friend.
Re: Yeah, we know. It's more complicated. (Score:2)
Brought to you by radical nukes (Score:1)
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I say we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Oh, wait... Um...
We know... (Score:5, Informative)
There have been dozens of documentaries and shows about this very subject.
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DMZ between North and South Korea.
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There too. They've also got an abundance of wild boars in the DMZ which are actually a bit of a problem.
Re:We know... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd have thought so, but they exist and are in abundance. I do know that pigs have good sniffers, so maybe they're smart enough to avoid the mines? Maybe they've learned the smell means going near it is a bad idea? Pigs are also pretty smart.
I have no idea if any of that translates to wild boars. I just know regular pigs are both smart and have a good sense of smell. I am definitely not a biologist and thus unqualified to opine.
Re: We know... (Score:2)
Re: We know... (Score:2)
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Ha! I knew they had good sniffers on 'em. Great link, thanks.
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Yeah, the pigs will probably be like "Last time I stepped on something that smelled like that, I was blown up. Better stay away from now on."
Or actually, perhaps the pigs that like the smell of landmines have been eliminated Darwin-style.
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Yes, who would have figured nature comes roaring back when humans evacuate, or that animals and plants don't respect the dangers of long-term radiation poisoning? Interesting to see, but not all that surprising.
Chernobyl was in the news for other reasons, so these old related stories get dragged out as well.
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One of the papers/news sites mentioned how few mutations that have been found and how it was quite a bit less than had been expected.
Radioactive Wolves, a PBS production on Nature, was the most interesting of videos that I've seen on the subject.
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Actually the mutation rate is pretty high, and plenty of animals die just after birth.
No idea where you get your nonsense from.
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Or the fact that there was no long term radiation poisoning going on, plants (which don't have the luxury of being able to move if it's uncomfortable) were largely unaffected even very close to the location.
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Do you want Triffids?
Because this is how you get Triffids!
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Well,
but you do know there are guided tours, with masks and dosi meter, so you can go and check for yourself?
Idiot?
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Shorter life spawn for nature is acceptable. (Score:2, Insightful)
Horse population (Score:4, Funny)
Przewalski's horses. For many decades they were considered the last truly wild horse in the world. In the 1970s they were almost rendered extinct in the wild, but a captive breeding program managed to rescue the species from extinction. Today, several hundred live in the wild in the steppes of Asia and in Europe, but there's also a steadily growing population - to the surprise of many - in Chernobyl.
Of especial note is the growing population of previously-unknown subspecies of Przewalski's horses. For example, one subspecies of the wild horses has three heads. Another has scales.
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Recent genetic analysis has shown that Przewalski's horses are actually descendants of domesticated horses gone wild, the original wild horse is gone.
It wasn't a nuclear explosion (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't a nuclear explosion. It's too bad when a journalist gets basic facts wrong and people still believe you.
Re:It wasn't a nuclear explosion (Score:4, Interesting)
actually it was, for a small time. Not so well known, but there was a criticality accident, i.e. unstable to fast neutron fission. (Background: uranium immediately fissions with 2 neutrons very quickly, and sometimes a 3rd a few hours later. This completely fortuitous and random fact makes reactors possible because you can arrange it to be marginally stable/unstable to overall exponenetial dynamics with the 3rd neutron, but dissipative against the 1st two. A weapon is unstable to the fast neutron fission and that's why it lasts only a few microseconds).
There was a burst of short-lived radioisotopes from fission, which point back to a single moment of emission. The energy released from fast fission wasn't enormous but it was enough and fast enough to cause damage and start the conditions for a fire.
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I would have expected an earth-shattering kaboom.
Re:It wasn't a nuclear explosion (Score:5, Informative)
It blew up the building it was housed in, but even though there was no containment building (unlike reactors outside the USSR), the building next door was unaffected and the reactor inside continued producing electricity. The three other reactors on the site were kept online and staffed for years afterward [world-nuclear-news.org].
Even if this were a "nuclear explosion" rather than a "steam explosion" as most people call it, it would still be an example of the Non-Central Fallacy, also known as The Worst Argument In The World" [lesswrong.com]: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction (Nuclear explosion! The horror!). Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X (Chernobyl explosion), even though it is not a central member of that category."
For that matter, all those people who treat Chernobyl as being basically the same as Western reactors are using a "dual form" of the worst argument in the world [lesswrong.com]: "X gives us a certain emotional reaction, and it is in a category. Therefore, we should apply that same emotional reaction to the whole category, even though X is not a central member of it." Or "X (Chernobyl) is good/bad because <facts> (deadly explosion), and it's in a category (nuclear reactors), so the category as a whole is good/bad."
But among other flaws, Chernobyl had two dangerous features that no western reactor has:
The Russians didn't design it this way because they were idiots, they did it because they were cheapskates. Containment buildings cost money, and the positive-void-coefficient design (using a graphite moderator in place of heavy water) allowed them to use ordinary water as coolant plus unenriched uranium, both of which reduced costs as compared to a safer design. Again, this design has never been legal in the western world.
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Certain UK MAGNOX reactors lack secondary containment, as well as some early French reactors derived from them. I think they've all been shut down now, but Western reactors were built without secondary containment.
Re:It wasn't a nuclear explosion (Score:4, Informative)
Certain UK MAGNOX reactors lack secondary containment, as well as some early French reactors derived from them. I think they've all been shut down now, but Western reactors were built without secondary containment.
That's true, but the MAGNOX reactors were gas cooled not water cooled. There's no risk of a steam or hydrogen explosion in a MAGNOX reactor.
Some CANDU reactors have a positive void coefficient and depend on the ability to rapidly drain the heavy water moderator from the calandria to prevent a runaway reaction. I guess it depends on your definition of "substantially" though.
Yes, it's very substantially different. The coolant and moderator are separate so if the reactor overheats and the coolant starts to boil, the reactor is still not in positive feedback territory. You have to get all the way through to the cool moderator (insulated from the coolant and which has a large mass too). The coefficients of CANDU are also small, so things have to go very wrong for a long time. Compare to the RBMK which has a high void coefficient in the coolant so when things go bad they go bad really fast. Somehow the CANDU reactor would have to stay live without the passive systems kicking in long enough to start boiling the moderator. Given that the fuel bundles are designed to lose reactivity when they overheat, that would be tricky.
Designs that required computer control were not legal for power generation in the US, which would also have prevented an RBMK-like design from being built in the US (although not elsewhere in the Western world).
RBMK like designs have never been legal in the Western world. There's more to reactors than a containment building and a naive threshold on the void coefficient. The CANDU only goes positive under conditions which would be very hard to achieve and has a variety of passive safety measures to prevent it getting there. Gas cooled reactors lack the same explosion potential as water ones.
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No, if the heavy water moderator boils, the reactivity will drop. Heavy steam is far less dense than heavy water (due to phase change), and hence becomes a less effective moderator. If the light water coolant boils, its neutron absorbin
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I don't think you're correct, or the wiki page is wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In the diagram of the reactor, the only use of light water is the secondary loop. The primary coolant loop and the moderator in the calandria are both heavy water.
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Thanks for the info -- I thought that all of the western reactors that lacked secondary containment were either early military reactors (built chiefly to create weapons-grade plutonium and may or may not produce electricity) or (early or very small) experimental reactors. I also see now that my message wasn't *perfectly* clear that I was only talking about civilian power.
Wikipedia says that "Magnox was designed with the dual purpose of producing elect
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That's okay. After the accident, they made up for that by growing some spherical cows.
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It was not a steam explosion.
It was burning graphite. (* facepalm *)
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Why do you not just read the wikipedia article.
It explains in great detail what went wrong.
No need to invent stuff that never happened.
Re:It wasn't a nuclear explosion (Score:5, Informative)
There certainly was a nuclear explosion - an uncontrolled burst of fission, resulting in the liberation of significant energy. That's what produced the energy that lead to the steam explosion and ignited the fire.
It may have the equivalent of a hand grenade rather than the level-whole-cities explosion associated with nuclear weapons, but that doesn't change the nature of the event.
So this is about jargon. In the strict jargon of nuclear engineering, this was a criticality accident followed immediately by a steam explosion. This is to separate this type of event from a nuclear explosion where the explosive force comes directly from the energy released by the fissioning as happens in a nuclear weapon. Not sure this matters to a layperson but it does to engineers. It matters because the amount of fission products is drastically (like 1000x) different for a nuclear explosion vs a criticality accident followed by a steam explosion. So its a really good thing it wasn't an actual nuclear explosion. There are 10 tons of fuel in a nuclear reactor. There are about 12kg of fuel in a nuclear weapon. I hope this puts it into perspective on the differences between a nuclear explosion and what happened at Chernobyl.
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So this is about jargon. In the strict jargon of nuclear engineering, this was a criticality accident followed immediately by a steam explosion. This is to separate this type of event from a nuclear explosion where the explosive force comes directly from the energy released by the fissioning as happens in a nuclear weapon.
I thought the current hypothesis was that it went prompt critical giving a small nuclear explosion (more of a fizzle) followed by a larger steam explosion.
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I thought the current hypothesis was that it went prompt critical giving a small nuclear explosion (more of a fizzle) followed by a larger steam explosion.
My understanding is that the tips of the control rods had moderator material on them. When the control rods were re-inserted, it caused a power spike from a criticality event which flash boiled the water and caused a steam explosion. Also, it depends on what you call an explosion, the criticality event certainly released a lot of energy but the hole in the reactor was from a steam explosion.
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Well, people have been trying to piece together what happened and it's not obvious since it blew up and a lot was going on at time. I think the current hypothesis is that thermal runaway melted the fuel which went prompt ejecting a bunch of stuff upwards through the fuel channels high into the atmosphere followed very shortly by a steam explosion (which was more energetic). Definitely the steam did most of the damage.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-... [phys.org]
Impossible to be sure though.
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You say 'nuclear explosion' and 99.999% of people think Hiroshima. Only a physics nerd calls what happened a nuclear explosion.
Noble Chernoble (Score:1)
I will recommend a few documentaries about the wolves. It's interesting that just touching the grass or any surface is considered very dangerous for humans.
Kid of Speed is still up (Score:3)
Remember Kid of Speed? I guess the factuality of it was eventually questioned. But even as a work of fiction it is pretty good.
https://www.angelfire.com/extr... [angelfire.com]
What I'm Waiting For (Score:2)
Define "Thriving" (Score:1)
Re:Define "Thriving" (Score:4)
Animals full of rampant mutations probably doesn't qualify as "thriving"
After reading a number of articles on this subject just now, it seems the experts on the subject are disagreeing with you. In virtually every article I read the word "thriving" was used several times. There was references to mutations but these mutations where not enough to stop the populations from thriving.
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Animals that are not hunted by humans are obviously "thriving".
You seem to forget that the natural life span of a deer is roughly 6 years, and that the mutations die early.
Or you are just a moron, no idea.
Last wild horses (Score:2)
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They're equine animals, but so are burros. They're not actually horses.
Genetic tests on bones found in archeological sites where horses were first domesticated show that Przewalski's horses are wild descendants of domesticated horses, the actual wild horses seem to be gone.
What does wildlife know? (Score:3)
Wildlife knows nothing about birth rates, mutations, cancer, death. Wildlife knows about food and sex, and as long as there's plenty of both, it will "thrive".
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Wildlife knows nothing about birth rates, mutations, cancer, death. Wildlife knows about food and sex, and as long as there's plenty of both, it will "thrive".
Mother nature finds this human concept of the individual to be very confusing.
The alcohol was destined for the UK (Score:2)
UK as in Ukraine, that is
Was seized just the same
Evolution in Action... (Score:2)
The fact that wildlife is thriving in a highly radioactive environment shows the power of evolution--life has adapted, and mutated to survive in the new environment. It's a travesty about Chernobyl but it shows that life will survive, in spite of humankind's blunders.
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A couple billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon, a natural nuclear reactor irradiated the area for several hundred thousand years. Life seemed to have done fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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a natural nuclear reactor irradiated the area for several hundred thousand years. Life seemed to have done fine.
Probably because it actually did not irradiated the area Seriously - why are people so stupid?
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The last that I read was that it had apparently contaminated ground water, as decay products were found in rocks downstream. Of course life on land at that point was mostly lichens and fungi (had forgotten the time scale).
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That reactor was basically a gigantic rock.
apparently contaminated ground water, as decay products were found in rocks downstream
Not impossible, but unlikely. Or you are talking about a different "natural nuclear reactor" that I have in mind.
The one in Africa, I know about has even caves which were inhabitated by early humans, some 40 - 50 thousand years ago.
Wild cows too (Score:2)