Wildlife Defies Chernobyl Radiation 612
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that wildlife has reappeared in the Chernobyl region even with high levels of radiation. Populations of animals both common and rare have increased substantially and there are tantalizing reports of bear footprints and confirmed reports of large colonies of wild boars and wolves. These animals are radioactive but otherwise healthy. A large number of animals died initially due to problems like destroyed thyroid glands but their offspring seem to be physically healthy. Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste. The article includes some controversial statements recommending disposal of nuclear waste in tropical forests to keep forest land away from greedy developers and farmers"
Shame about the humans (Score:1, Insightful)
thats great about the wildlife , its a shame the same couldnt be said about the children and their offspring [ccp-intl.org] for generations to come, of course we need more power stations because they are the cheapest form of power, right [zeenews.com] ?
But ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a name for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
He has found ample evidence of DNA mutations, but nothing that affected the animals' physiology or reproductive ability. "Nothing with two heads," he says.
It's as if the positive changes are being selected in favor of the negative changes.
Re:Is there a name for this? (Score:2, Insightful)
The mutations that were seriously debelitating didn't survive long enough to breed.
Interesting strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm.. increasing mutation rates where they are already sky-high, as opposed to the conventional wisdom of minimizing exposure.
It's like adding nature to nature. I like it.
It's like that at the Hanford Reservation (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't sound so good (Score:5, Insightful)
Just goes to show (Score:2, Insightful)
rain forests have people too... (Score:2, Insightful)
I still think the Sun is the best pace to dispose of the longer half-life (>100 yrs as very very unsafe) stuff.
long-term effect (Score:5, Insightful)
So, not everyone living in an irradiated area will have their flesh falling off, but for us long-lifed humans, the life would be filled with more misery and an early ending. Maybe cancer at 20. And for normal human socities, "old farts" (those over 30) are really what drive the society.
Re:Shame about the humans (Score:3, Insightful)
I for one, disagree, with this simplistic argument. For example, when we use coal or fossil fuels, more damage is done, but it is distributed, and less visible (and easy to take pictures of the victims).
Nonetheless, there is no way in hell the above post is flamebait.
Re:But ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider that the average human conception has about three dangerous mutations even without Chernobyl. Why aren't we oatmeal? Because a goodly percentage of conceptions never make it past the blastocyst stage due to excessive nasty chromosomal damage, while we lucky survivors had fewer.
Re:Contrary to Common Assumptions? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you're saying is, regardless of the lack of evidence for harmful mutation that should be evident, there MUST be harm becase you KNOW that radiation causes it?
Way to be scientific about this.
A bunch of thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
So why are we surprised that any of this is happening?
Evolution Opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
That to me sounds as an opportunity for an evolution leap. Most mutations will be bad and disappear eventually, but there is this slight chance that few others will be beneficial for the species and eventually dominate. I wouldn't be surprised if few hundrend years from now we end up with "Bear Chernobilus" that hibernates only half the time and has double the mating seasons
Positive unintended consequenses (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:But ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think they adapted. The ones that didn't survive didn't have the capability.
Re:Disposal of nuclear waste could be trivial (Score:3, Insightful)
The earth's ~30km/s velocity in orbit around the sun has no real impact on this scenario. Once you hit earth's escape velocity, you're effectively free of earth's gravity and into the domain of the sun's gravity. You'll get to the sun eventually as long as you don't hit something else first, or accelerate far more to beyond the sun's ~43km/s escape velocity, and I don't suppose it really matters how long it takes waste to reach the sun once it's on trajectory.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
Re:Contrary to Common Assumptions? (Score:4, Insightful)
The offspring you find in the wild is pretty normal. Of course, just about all offspring that does exhibit deleterious phenotypic expression die very quickly, and is in most cases spontaneously aborted long before birth. Most species can produce a lot more offspring than actually survive to adulthood (and most species do usually produce slightly more, as a hedge), so dramatically higher infant mortality or aborted pregnancies would just be compensated for by having more pregnancies and larger klutches in the first place. Of course, to some extent the mortality is lowered by the lack of human activities. You could hypothesize a donut-shaped overall mortality graph with the senter around the reactor and the outer edge at the edge of normal human habitation. Near the center you'd have high mortality from the radiation effects, and high mortality in human-habitated areas, but in between there'd be a sweet spot, with just a small increase in radiation mortality completely swamped by the lack of humans.
In fact, it would be really interesting to see a study of klutch size among birds nesting at the plant compared to the same species at various distances away from the area.
Re:Shame about the humans (Score:3, Insightful)
When scientists and engineers create a cost-effective and safe way to do something, it's not their fault if politicking and societal faults get in the way of its implementation.
Re:Is there a name for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I have another interpretation of this statement: 'the creatures that died were selected to go to heaven before the other animals with the better-designed DNA.' So, which animals have the 'better-designed' DNA? The ones that died first and are now with the creator, or the ones still left foraging in the forest? Something else to think about. One could argue that the animals who went back home to the creator before the other animals really had the better-designed DNA.
I hear so much in the media about how life is/was intelligently designed, but no one seems to make the argument I just posted. Death is very much apart of life, and according to supporters of ID, one would think that at least some of them would take sides with my argument, not that I believe the argument, which I do not because I'm a scientist. Good discussion is healthy for everyone.
Re:But ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That doesn't sound so good (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the understanding of just how freakishly robust nature can be in coming back from devastating damage is where the misunderstanding comes in.
In the first generation, massive radiation exposure deaths did destroy the population and had a massive effect on birth rates for that generation.
However, in nature, ecosystems are just that - systems. With most predators dead and most of the same species competition for their resources, those herbivors that did survive would have been in pure nirvana. Additionally, natural selection would mean that only those most able to survive the effects of radiation would be passing their robust genes on down.
As the herbivorous population began to rebuild and bloom again from the weird but now ideal environment, those carnivors that could survive would similarly have a minimum of competition and could thus flourish. They too, as the survivors, would be passing on their resiliant genes as well as having larger surviving litters as they were more able to feed them.
Plus, remember, many animals only need a year or two to reach sexual maturity. 20 years can be a full ten generations.
In short, nature has all kinds of tricks built in to help it recover very quickly from any given kind of devastation.
The thing is, whilst this is great for there being an ultimate animal population, it sucks just as badly for specific individuals. Whilst animals will bounce back as a species, individual humans would likely take offense at not getting to be the specific ones who survived and passed on genes.
Look at Iraq or the 9/11 attacks - a couple of thousand deaths out of a population of many hundreds of thousands of times that is considered utterly unacceptable. In animal populations, a 50% die off in a hard winter or 95% die off in a nuclear accident is recoverable. In modern human populations, a 1-2% death rate would be considered a massive disaster and involve much freaking out. Sure, we might recover, but no individual would consider those kinds of odds even close to reasonable.
Plus, even if we could be philosophical about humanity bouncing somewhat back in just ten generations and fully in 20-50, from a 95-99% die off, that's still 200 years for a partial return and 400-1,000 years for a full return, given 20 year human generations.
So, in the scale of things, sure, humanity (albeit in some slightly changed form as different "fitter" ones survived) would likely survive a nuclear holocaust and the animals would too (assuming no climate change etc.). However, given humanities tendency to see ourselves as individuals and only care about our own specific lifetimes, I doubt a 1-5% chance of survival and an ultimate bounceback in 1,000 years is anything any modern human would consider acceptable.
And, of course, there's also civilization to consider. Animals simply need to recover numbers and are considered bounced back. 1-5% of humanity surviving would likely lead to a massive dark age. Even if we could recover our numbers in 1,000 years (ignoring that modern numbers are sustained soley by technology), we'd likely need several times that before our technologies recovered to the point where we had a good enough understanding of physics to be able to nuke ourselves all over again.
So... For animals, it sucks for a generation or ten but they do bounce back.
Bouncing back still isn't something modern man would consider a reasonable option.
Re:No suprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody have any clue as to the authenticity of the photos?
(Particularly, since we're talking about the wildlife in this thread, the ones of the mutant animals [angelfire.com]? Which she admits are not hers.)
Re:Disposal of nuclear waste could be trivial (Score:5, Insightful)
An excellent point, one that I think can't be said enough. While we're burying all this nuclear waste, or tossing it down into the Marianas Trench, or whatever, I think it's important to consider that while the storage method should be able to last as long as the longest-lived dangerous isotopes in the waste (in case we just want to leave it there) it should also have as a design criteria the ability for us to recover it.
I could easily envision a time in the future, a lot sooner than 10,000 years or even a few hundred, when we might want to get at some of that "waste" in order to reprocess it in ways that are not economically viable, or perhaps technologically feasible, right now.
This is hugely the case with the type of nuclear energy we use in the United States, where the majority of the fuel rods are comprised of U-238 and only a small percentage of it is U-235, the latter is the fissionable fuel, the former isn't (although it can be bred into Plutonium) and currently we really just use it as a sort of contaminant in order to make weaponization of the fuel difficult. A change in attitudes regarding breeder reactors would instantly make U-238, particularly the stuff that comes out of reactors (which has greater-than-trace amounts of plutonium in it already) a hot commodity. (No pun intended.)
Frankly given our energy requirements, I think the need to reprocess nuclear fuel waste may occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within a few centuries or even decades, depending on technological developments of other energy sources and the geopolitics of Uranium mining, and thus the solutions for waste storage that are recoverable while also being secure are the best ones.
Do you think slowly? (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree, but I would posit that being radioactive and having large portions of your DNA damaged could be classified by reasonable people as "harm". Just because you don't understand the way in which every piece of DNA functions does not mean that everything is fine.
It's a good thing there are so many people who disagree though. I think they should be allowed to move in to the restricted zone. I have no objection to your becoming radioactive, nor do I object to the wholesale modification of your DNA.
Re:Disposal of nuclear waste could be trivial (Score:2, Insightful)
It would work if it wasn't $20,000/lb or whatever. I don't think radioactive waste will affect us from 93 million miles away.
reply:
Uhm, the Earth is nice and habitable and well lit (for about half the day at most latitudes) because of waste products from a nuclear event. That event happens in a place about 93 million miles away. If the earth lacked it's electromagnetic field and ozone layer we'd be toast right quick double-time like. The sun puts out a boatload of hazardous emissions, and more than a lethal dosage reaches the earth.
Now, a few thousand (or even million) tons of radioactive waste added to the sun's output wouldn't likely to be noticed due to the overwheleming output of the sun (like lighting a candle outdoors at noon on a cloudless day on top of a snow covered mountain.)
Re:Disposal of nuclear waste could be trivial (Score:3, Insightful)
You're calling building a space elevator trivial? Damn, what do you consider hard?
reply:
FTL travel.
Time travel.
Raising of the dead.
Understanding women.
Re:But ... (Score:3, Insightful)
So.. the grandkids are now immune to nuclear bombs?
Re:But currently the radiation level is small (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, pictures of deformed babies don't really support your argument either way except to include emotional aspect to this argument. Deformed babies are born everyday. What I think would be important is the number of deformed babies and type of deformalities compared to "normal" population.
Some will always survive a nuke (Score:4, Insightful)
Some die instantly at the blast.
Some die within the next hours.
Some die within the next days/weeks/months.
Fertility goes DOWN, but those THAT have offspring will have a higher chance to raise them to maturity (less competition).
Again, of those some will die due to mutation.
Some will have a shorter life expectance. As long as they mature and can raise at least one generation of offspring, it's not so important.
Also keep in mind that quite a few animals CAN only raise one generation of offspring, they die after giving birth/laying eggs.
Bottom line, of course animals will survive, as a group. Humans would too, the body count would be incredibly high and the chance that YOU, as an individual, survive, is incredibly small. But as a species, you can fairly reliably survive a nuking.
What? Natural selection? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:While we're doing movie quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Uninformed and Inaccurate Alarmism, by Michael Crichton?
Re:While we're doing movie quotes (Score:3, Insightful)
Now it seems like everyone is in need of "suspension of suspension of disbelief." Since when did it become fashonable to read fiction and believe all the hype therein?
If you read Dan Brown and take him as an authority on biblical history and truth and you read Crichton and ridicule him for bending the truth to support his FICTION you might need to take a step back from the novel you are reading and have a healthy dose of reality. Suspension of disbelief should end when the covers are closed.