- Special: Chernobyl 25 years later
- Environment: Forest fires show the vulnerability of Chernobyl
Last summer, in the midst of a fever for the Chernobyl series on the HBO channel, viewers from around the world asked themselves on social networks if there would be a second season. In Kiev they did not see grace . The Ukrainians, who along with the Belarusians were the hardest hit by the nuclear accident that occurred on that day in 1986 (more than 9,000 dead over the years, tens of thousands of sick and displaced people) could not help but raise their eyebrows at this frivolity of viewers.
The atomic wound was supposed to be closed forever with the steel of the new cover placed on the plant in 2016. But throughout this month of April the area has suffered the worst fires that were remembered , degrading an environment that was beginning to recover and igniting again the alarms in the capital before a possible toxic cloud. Smoke has come to Kiev. And radiation levels have also increased, for the moment without exceeding the threshold that carries a health risk. In a city confined by the coronavirus, the second season of Chernobyl has occurred without warning.
More than 11,500 hectares have been burned. The fires, which have been burning since April 4, are estimated to have cost tens of millions. Some 2,500 firefighters and emergency personnel have been dispatched to the area, where several fires continue to threaten the plant . 22% of the exclusion zone has burned, according to activists on the ground. Greenpeace confirms that they are the largest fires ever recorded in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, "due to abnormally hot, dry and very windy weather." Authorities are investigating stubble burning and also a group of reckless visitors.
"There is a need for more effective fire control, because in that area there are fires every summer. When we pollute territories, we cannot simply leave: we must treat it like any other contaminated area and monitor it," explains Kate Brown, author of Manual de Survival (edited in Spain by Capitán Swing), a book in which he denounces how the USSR tried to hide the truth of the disaster with Western collaboration.
Forgotten by humans until a series put it back on the map three decades after the accident, the environment of Chernobyl began to defeat the clichés. Over the years the scene of the world's worst nuclear disaster has become a unique conservation area that is home to many hard-to-find animals and plants.
Everything within the exclusion zone , an area with an irregular diameter of about 30 or 40 kilometers, which in 1986 was sentenced to be empty for centuries. "And there are plenty of radioactive spots left, even outside the exclusion zone," says Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster , from New York .
A radioactive Eden
Bears, bison, wolves, moose, lynx, wild horses, and some 200 species of birds -among other animals- took advantage of the disappearance of the human being to form a surprising ecosystem, which is home to great biodiversity. Higginbotham considers it a "radioactive Eden". "There is the Amazon of Europe," says Brown, who documents in his book how in that black spring of 1986 an immense radioactive cloud composed of cesium, strontium, iodine and plutonium traveled first to the south, towards the interior of Ukraine, and later to the north, "permeating all of southern Belarus, which was another agrarian republic."
After the prompt evacuation of the inhabitants of the Chernobyl area, squads of Soviet recruits were ordered to shoot any animal that prowled . The new century has entered, the human being has returned to the crime scene with a better approach. The TREE (Transference, Exposure and Effects) project installed cameras hidden throughout the exclusion zone for several years, which proved the existence of abundant fauna at all levels of radiation. Thus, the presence of European brown bears and bisons in the Ukrainian area was demonstrated for the first time.
"The bears came from the northeast decades after the accident , they were detected about six years ago and the bison entered in a similar way," explains biologist Germán Orizaola, who has worked in that area in recent years. Orizaola has followed the evolution of the animals most affected by the fires these days: the wild horses of przewalski, an endangered species native to Mongolia. They were released in the area in 1998.
"They are fascinating, they were extinct in nature and were recovered from zoos," adds this researcher from the Institute for Research in Biodiversity at the University of Oviedo-CSIC. When the specimens were installed, they went from 30 to 20, but then went back up to 150 today. In 2018, scientists detected twelve herds, "of which three or four have lost all the territory they inhabited by fire ," explains Orizaola. , who hopes to be able to return to the exclusion zone to take stock of damages.
Goodbye to the cursed forest
These days satellites deliver bleak images of burned forests. "The strong wind has managed to move the fire on both sides of the old nuclear power plant," Olena Gnes, a tour guide and now an activist dedicated to helping to extinguish the fires, told this newspaper from around Chernobyl. They have been controlled, but they remain latent.
"Thank God, Pripyat has been saved so far, but entire areas of forest have disappeared, including the famous Red Forest", baptized with that name in 1986. In the spring of that year, 200,000 people were deployed in the area to appease the effects of the accident: initially they were soldiers, police and firefighters. Civilians were also recruited to clean up to form a group of more than half a million people. They were called "liquidators" . Part of his job was to cut down those cursed trees that had absorbed all the radiation.
Few animals survived the highest radioactive doses. But the main fear at the time was that the inevitable fires - which have already occurred several times - would disperse the radioactive material from those trees located west of the plant as suspended particles. So most of it was buried along with contaminated rubble in trenches three meters deep.
Those trenches were covered with a thick carpet of sand, brought in by huge Kamaz trucks. As Higginbotham recalls, "Radionuclides cannot be decomposed or destroyed, only relocated or buried." Forest fires in polluted areas are today a big problem for Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, "where five million people still live in polluted areas," says Greenpeace.
Mutations in animals
Although nature has made its way, radiation has caused some changes in animals. Orizaola has investigated with the Chernobyl amphibians : "In the area we see some indication of adaptive responses to radiation, such as changes in the coloration of frogs, animals that we have worked with at all levels of radiation." Outside the exclusion zone they are bright green, but alongside Chernobyl "we find many darker ones, even black and gray . I think it is a selection process in which the coloration protects them." The experience corresponds to what was found at the time in the crashed reactor: mushrooms appeared, but they were all black.
Frogs are not the only case. "In studies on swallows albinism and worse reproduction have been detected," explains the scientist, who, however, warns that each finding must be handled with care "because, for example, the swallow depends a lot on the human being, so there it is in a not so favorable environment. " The same thing happens when judging the desolation of the Red Forest, which has high levels of radioactivity but also other drawbacks such as being close to the highway, the power station and other points where little human traffic is concentrated. On the other hand, it is unlikely to find cases such as a wolf with a tumor, even if there are, "because, simply, animals with such problems or malformations simply die ."
Research on the advance of fauna in the area shows that for some species, especially large mammals, the pressure of human activities would turn out to be more negative in the medium term for fauna than a nuclear accident. This is why " animal studies are so helpful in understanding the effects of radiation ."
"Hopefully there will be no more nuclear disasters like Chernobyl, but if there were, we would have to think about whether the exclusion zone model was good, because it caused a lot of psychological damage to the displaced." Wild horses, "vertebrates like us, are an example of a return to a contaminated area, inhabiting areas with acceptable levels of radiation . " The fires of these days threaten to erase the test field in which nature doubled the pulse of uranium.
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