Chernobyl 2016
Three decades after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster, Fred Pearce visits the exclusion zone where nature is rebounding in a surprising demonstration of extreme rewilding.
The post-nuclear wasteland where nature thrives
An old fire station in Podil, an up-and-coming district of Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, houses one of the scariest museums I have ever visited. The Chernobyl Museum recounts the 1986 disaster that unfolded after a reactor at the nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine overheated, causing a massive explosion that blew off its protective shield and exposed the burning uranium core to the skies for 10 days, releasing vast amounts of radioactive material into the air.
The displays describe in brutal detail how the world’s worst nuclear accident unfolded. More than 300,000 people were evacuated from a hastily established exclusion zone covering a 30km radius around the plant, in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus. But dozens of ‘liquidators’ – tens of thousands of firefighters, soldiers and ordinary citizens conscripted to put out the fire and clean up radioactive debris – died from radiation poisoning over the next few weeks. It’s estimated that the toll of premature deaths will top 4,000, most victims of cancers that developed over the following years.
Nature was also blighted. In the months after the disaster, the intense radiation all but eliminated wildlife close to the plant. The needles of pine trees turned to the colour of rust in an area now called the Red Forest. Even the earthworms disappeared. But here is the strange thing. In the foyer of the museum, a recently created low-budget afterthought to the exhibits upstairs displays what happened next to nature in the exclusion zone. And the news is beguilingly good.
Visitors expecting images of a blasted wasteland, or animals glowing in the dark, are in for a surprise. Instead, pictured strutting round the exclusion zone are extremely healthy-looking grey wolves, wild boar, Przewalski’s horses (reintroduced at Chernobyl in 1998), hares, foxes, moose and even a brown bear or two. The panels quote biologists giving their verdict.
Sergey Gaschak is scientific director of the Ukraine government’s Chernobyl Radioecology Centre, and has been monitoring wildlife since arriving as a liquidator in 1986. He says that the exodus of people has resulted in “a reinstatement [of nature] unique in Europe.” The exclusion zone has created “endless opportunities for animals and plants to prosper”. Marina Shkvyria of the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology in Kiev agrees: “The exclusion zone for me is a window into the past of Europe, when bears and wolves were the bosses here.”
So what is going on? The exclusion zone, which now covers over 4,100 sq km, is one of the most radioactive landscapes on Earth, yet seems to be in the pink of health. This matters not just for Chernobyl. There is no better place for researchers to unravel just what damage radiation does to nature. I travelled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone twice in 2016, on the second occasion attending an international workshop of scientists intent on unravelling this puzzle.
What I have seen is that wildlife generally keeps away from the areas where people go: around the power plant; in the town of Chernobyl, where several thousand people live and work part time; and in Pripyat, the model Soviet city evacuated after the disaster, which is now a post-apocalyptic attraction for day-trippers. But elsewhere, in the empty forests and wetlands that cover two-thirds of the zone, it mostly thrives.
Radiation seems almost an irrelevance. Despite it, biodiversity in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is greater than elsewhere in Ukraine – greater even than in other protected areas. Earlier this year, the country’s ministry of ecology announced that it would turn its part of the exclusion zone into a wildlife reserve.
At the workshop I attended, Shkvyria gave a cautious presentation on the wildlife boom, based on helicopter surveys of animal tracks in winter snow. She reported 40–50 wolves around seven dens she has mapped in the Ukrainian half of the zone, a dozen or so Eurasian lynx and just one or two brown bears. But later, over dinner, Gaschak told me those figures are far too conservative. “We can’t prove it yet. But I think there may be around 60–90 lynx and maybe even more wolves – and that’s just the adults. Wolves are everywhere on the Ukrainian side of the exclusion zone.”
Some say that the occasional brown bears are passing through from their ranges in national parks in Belarus or Russia. After all, they haven’t been native in northern Ukraine for a century. But, says Gaschak, “bears have been here permanently for over a decade, and we have seen cubs.”
Afterwards, Gaschak took me to Buryakovka, one of the 113 villages evacuated after the nuclear accident. “We are only 300m from the centre of the western [ fallout] trace,” he said. Radiation was 50 times that of surrounding areas. At the end of a long, potholed and overgrown lane, amid half-a-dozen wrecked houses, he had set up two camera-traps. He took out the memory card from one of them and
“CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE IS A WINDOW INTO THE PAST OF EUROPE, WHEN BEARS AND WOLVES WERE THE BOSSES.”
plugged it into his laptop. It had recorded images made when passing animals tripped the shutter during the previous two weeks.
Up popped a procession of Przewalski’s horses plus a fox, a moose and several red deer. The other camera-trap had captured images of wild boar, pine martens, grey wolves, foxes, raccoons (non-native), badgers and a couple of rutting male red deer. “I’ve seen lynx in this village, too,” he told me. Gaschak’s checklist of wildlife in the exclusion zone now features 178 species of breeding bird, including nine woodpecker, four eagle and eight owl species, as well as 59 species of mammal, among them the Eurasian beaver and otter.
The highlight of my visits to Chernobyl was the sight of a white-tailed eagle soaring above the cooling pond, looking for fish. The 12km-long pond, used to douse the burning reactor, is now one of the most radioactive bodies of water on the planet. Its giant catfish are radioactive, and so presumably was the eagle. But it didn’t seem to matter.
The Ukrainian researchers are not alone in declaring that, in the absence of people, wildlife is thriving in the exclusion zone. Over the border in Belarus, where the government has created the Polesye State Radioecological Reserve in its half of the exclusion zone, researchers have found rising numbers of moose, roe deer, wild boar and wolves, and no evidence of a link to radiation levels.
Though some highly radioactive isotopes emitted from the burning reactor decayed within days, we should be in no doubt that the exclusion zone remains radioactive. There is plutonium, which will hang around for thousands of years, and a lot more caesium-137 and strontium-90, isotopes with halflives of around 30 years, meaning that half of what fell onto the zone in 1986 remains today. And within this radioactive landscape are hotspots. Some correspond to the most intense fallout that settled as winds changed during the 10 days during which the reactor burned. Others are where seriously contaminated waste from the reactor was hastily buried near the surface in the weeks after the disaster.
Unlike at Fukushima, the site of another major nuclear accident in 2011, where the Japanese government is intent on decontaminating the landscape as much as possible to encourage its former human inhabitants to return, the cash-strapped governments of Ukraine and Belarus both decided to leave the radiation where it is and to create a permanent exclusion zone. With no plans to return people to the area, a wildlife reserve is a pragmatic solution. But whatever the motivation, the nuclear disaster has created Europe’s largest rewilding project: a cross-border zone the size of Luxembourg where the populations of many species are clearly increasing.
But that does not mean nature is not being damaged by the radiation. A number of academic studies show apparent ill-effects of radiation on wildlife in the zone – often at levels lower than scientists have ever measured in the lab, and sometimes at near to natural background levels. This is a worrying counter-narrative to the stories of nature blossoming.
Vasyl Yoschenko, a forest ecologist, told the workshop how the main trunks of Scots pines stop growing and instead divide into branches; the trees, normally tall and straight, become much more bush-like. And a series of studies by Canadian ecologist Tim Mousseau, now at the University of South Carolina in the USA, and his Danish co-researcher Anders Moller of the University Paris-Sud, have reported that places in the zone with higher levels of radiation suffer a range of lessvisible symptoms. They claim to have found fewer bacteria in birds’ feathers, damaged DNA in mice, fewer insects, and smaller craniums and reduced biodiversity among birds.
Most researchers at the workshop were sceptical of Mousseau and Moller’s findings. “We don’t see effects elsewhere at these levels – which are below natural background levels in parts of the UK,” said Nick Beresford of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster. For example, though Mousseau and Moller reported alarming declines in bumblebees, other researchers are finding them in good numbers through the zone.
A NUMBER OF STUDIES SHOW APPARENT ILLEFFECTS OF RADIATION ON WILDLIFE AT NEAR BACKGROUND LEVELS.
Reaching conclusions about radiation impacts from such studies is undoubtedly difficult. There is little baseline data for the numbers or health of species before the 1986 accident; the doses received by species moving around in the contaminated zone and feeding on particular plants or prey are hard to assess; and, perhaps most troubling, many of the apparent correlations may actually be indications or something unconnected with radiation.
The disappearance of birds from the most radioactive area, the Red Forest, probably falls into this last category, said Gaschak. The most eye-catching absentee is the pied flycatcher but, as Gaschak points out, it is well known that this species doesn’t enjoy the birch woodland that replaced the pine trees there. (Bizarrely, many of the bird nestboxes put up in the Red Forest were instead occupied by hazel dormice. This rodent, which has been disappearing from much of England and Wales, is thriving in the most contaminated part of Chernobyl.) “Outside researchers often forget that the exclusion zone has different landscapes and habitats. These can be much more important to wildlife populations than radiation,” said Gaschak.
As statisticians insist, correlation is not necessarily causation. Equally, Mousseau and Moller may be on to something.
Whatever the impacts of radiation, the rewilding of Chernobyl is clearly a fact. And it is mirrored in other radioactive exclusion zones. In recent months, as part of my research for a book investigating nuclear landscapes, I have seen similar things at Fukushima, where wild boar especially are in overdrive. And in a region behind the Urals in Siberia, an exclusion zone created after a major nuclear accident in 1957 now hosts more than 200 species of birds, including eagles and falcons, and 455 plant species, including locally rare ones such as lady’s slipper orchids.
Some believe that the flourishing wildlife in the Fukushima exclusion zone means that humans could, one day soon, safely return full-time. After all, some already have returned to Chernobyl. Following the evacuations 30 years ago, almost 1,800 people sneaked back to live in their former homes among the radioactive forests, growing vegetables, hunting animals and drawing water from contaminated wells. Most were old people, and they are dying out now. But a few hundred remain, and officials are now quietly recognising their right to stay.
During my first visit, I sat for two hours in the front room of 78-year-old Markevych Fedorovych, drinking his vodka and hearing about his life in the zone and his brushes with authority, such as the policemen who try to stop him catching fish in the contaminated River Pripyat. “I just tell them my father and grandfather fished here and they have no right to stop me. They go away,” he said triumphantly. “Anyway, look at me – don’t I look healthy? There’s nothing wrong with my fitness,” he added, calling his new wife from the kitchen to reinforce the point. “Of course, I know a lot of people who died of radiation. But they were people who worked with cleaning up the contamination. The liquidators. The rest of us have done fine.”
Bravado? Maybe. But Jim Smith of Portsmouth University, who has been conducting research in the exclusion zone for many years, insists that, away from the hotspots, radiation levels are low enough for people to live there, provided they don’t eat from the zone food that concentrates radioactivity, such as mushrooms and berries.
Nobody wants more radiation. But many animals don’t like people, either. There is a tipping point. Above that level – as became clear in the months after the Chernobyl disaster – wildlife is knocked on the head, even if there are no people around. But below it, wildlife populations can benefit more from the absence of humans than they lose from the presence of radiation. What the tragedy of Chernobyl is starting to show is that the tipping point may be higher than we once imagined. Life for Chernobyl’s wildlife may be a short one, but it’s a merry one.
NOBODY WANTS MORE RADIATION. BUT MANY ANIMALS DON’T LIKE PEOPLE, EITHER. THERE IS A TIPPING POINT.