If we have learned anything, it is that radioactive contamination, while a problem, does not so poison the environment that life will be unable to fully recover. Here we discover even pragmatic men and women have come back into the area.
The wildlife has invaded it heavily as this has become a refuge.
After all Hiroshima was never abandoned and has since been completely rebuilt.
The more serious problem is the complete dismantling of those reactors..
.
Chernobyl: The end of a three-decade experiment
Since the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant in 1986, an area of more than 4,000 square kilometres has been
abandoned. That could be about to change, as Victoria Gill discovered
during a week-long trip to the exclusion zone.
"This place is more than half
of my life," says Gennady Laptev. The broad-shouldered Ukrainian
scientist is smiling wistfully as we stand on the now dry ground of what
was Chernobyl nuclear power plant's cooling pond.
"I was only 25 when I started my work here as a liquidator. Now, I'm almost 60."
There
were thousands of liquidators - workers who came here as part of the
mammoth, dangerous clean-up operation following the 1986 explosion. The
worst nuclear accident in history.
Gennady shows me a coffee
table-sized platform, installed here to collect dust. This reservoir's
bed dried out when the pumps taking water from the nearby river were
finally switched off in 2014; 14 years after the remaining three
reactors there were shut down.
Analysing dust for
radioactive contamination is just a small part of the decades-long study
of this vast, abandoned area. The accident turned this landscape into a
giant, contaminated laboratory, where hundreds of scientists have
worked to find out how an environment recovers from nuclear catastrophe.
The experiment that turned into a global catastrophe
On 26 April, 1986, at 1:23AM, engineers cut power to
some systems at Chernobyl nuclear power plant's number 4 reactor. It
was a critical point in a test to understand what would happen during a
blackout. What engineers did not know was that the reactor was already
unstable.
The cut-off slowed turbines that drove cooling water to
the reactor. As less water turned to more steam, the pressure inside
built. By the time operators realised what was happening and tried to
shut down the reactor, it was too late.
A steam explosion blew
the lid off the reactor, exposing the core to the atmosphere. Two people
in the plant were killed and, as air fuelled a fire that burned for 10
days, a cloud of radioactive smoke and dust was carried on the wind
around Europe.
BBC News Our World: In the Shadow of Chernobyl -
Watch Victoria Gill's full report from the exclusion zone on Saturday
and Sunday, 16 and 17 February, at 2130 GMT on the BBC News Channel, and
afterwards on BBC iPlayer.
The first emergency workers rushed in as lethal
smoke billowed out. Of 134 who were diagnosed with acute radiation
sickness, 28 died within months. At least 19 have died since.
Gennady,
an environmental scientist with the Ukrainian HydroMeteorological
Institute, started work in the zone just three months after the
evacuation. "We used to fly in by helicopter every day from Kiev," he
explains, "to collect water and soil samples.
"The important thing then was to understand the extent of the contamination - to draw the first maps of the exclusion zone."
Today,
that zone spans Ukraine and Belarus. Covering more than 4,000 sq km -
more than twice the size of London. Every community within a 30km radius
of the plant was evacuated and abandoned; no-one was allowed to return
here to live.
In a forgotten, outer portion of the exclusion
zone, people were quietly allowed to return home a few months after the
disaster.
Unlike the "30km zone", no checkpoints prevent entry to
this semi-abandoned area. Narodichi, a town of more than 2,500 people,
is within that more-distant zone. Strict rules govern this officially
contaminated district; exclusion zone land must not be cultivated to
produce food and it cannot be developed.
Today, though, this part of Ukraine is not easily
delineated into two categories - contaminated or clean. Research has
shown that Chernobyl's aftermath is more complicated, and the landscape
here much stranger - and more interesting - than the stringent "do not
touch" rules in Narodichi would imply.
Fear of radiation could actually be hurting the people of Narodichi far more than the radiation itself.
'We're getting less radiation here than on the plane'
Over
Gennady's shoulder, I can see the nuclear power plant - less than a
kilometre away from the reservoir bed we're standing on. Gleaming in the
sunshine is the huge protective steel "New Safe Confinement" that now
entombs unit 4. It was slid over the top of the accident's epicentre in
2016. Beneath it, robotic cranes are dismantling 33-year-old,
radioactive wreckage.
Prof Jim Smith from the UK's University
of Portsmouth, a colleague of Gennady's, is a scientist who has studied
the aftermath of the disaster since 1990. Here on one of his numerous
research trips to the zone, he shows me a dosimeter - a black plastic
phone-sized gadget he carries throughout the visit.
It measures
the external dose of radiation he is getting from the environment. Atoms
of the nuclear fuel dust that were scattered here by the 1986 explosion
are spontaneously breaking down. They are giving out high-energy rays
as they do so, and Jim's dosimeter is detecting the dose of those that
we are receiving every hour.
The readings are in units (called microsieverts)
that only make sense to me in the context of other relatively
"radioactive activities". At one point in the middle of the flight to
Kiev - for example - his dosimeter read 1.8 microsieverts per hour.
"It's
currently 0.6," Jim says. "So that's about [a third] of what we were
getting on the flight." With the infamous power plant visible in the
background, I'm incredulous. But, Jim explains, we live on a radioactive
planet - natural radioactivity is all around us. "It comes from the
Sun's rays, from the food we eat, from the Earth," he says. That is why,
up at 12,000m on an airliner, with less shielding from Earth's
atmosphere, we receive a higher dose.
"Yes, the exclusion zone is
contaminated," he tells me, "but if we would put it on a map of
radiation dose worldwide - only the small 'hotspots' would stand out.
"Natural
radioactivity is all around us - it varies from country to country,
from place to place. Most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise
to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity
worldwide."
'You don't want to be in the hotspots for long'
While
the boundary of the exclusion zone has not changed, the landscape has -
almost beyond recognition. Where people were forced out, nature has
moved in. Wilderness combined with abandoned buildings, farms and
villages gives a sense of the post-apocalyptic.
Jim and his
colleagues spend their days here collecting samples and planting cameras
and audio recorders, which silently gather information about what
wildlife inhabits this post-human place, and how the radiation affects
it.
On the second day of our trip to the zone, I follow the team
into the Red Forest. This is an exclusion zone hotspot that, because of
the direction of the winds in 1986, took the brunt of the shower of
radioactive material.
We put on dust suits to avoid contaminating our clothing.
In the forest, Jim's dosimeter reads 35 - almost 60 times the external dose we were getting in the cooling pond.
"We
don't want to be here for too long," says Jim. He and the team gather
their soil samples swiftly, take some photographs and head back to the
car.
'The horses are adapting to the zone'
In the abandoned village of Burayakovka - just over
10km from the power plant - it is a very different approach. Jim and the
team take their time exploring the area. The dosimeter reads 1.0 -
still less than on the flight.
Inside one small, crumbling but
still colourful wooden house, the sad truth of what people so suddenly
lost here is apparent. A coat still slung over the arm of a chair is now
covered in three decades of dust.
But what people left behind - through
farming and gardening - has turned into a strangely rich habitat and
provisions for wild animals. Long-term studies have shown that there is
more wildlife in the abandoned villages than anywhere else in the zone.
Brown bears, lynx and wild boar are seen roaming here.
Dr Maryna
Shkvyria, a researcher based at Kiev Zoo, has spent years tracking and
studying the larger mammals that moved in when people moved out.
There are studies suggesting that birds in the most
contaminated areas show signs of damage to their DNA, but Maryna's work
is adding to a catalogue of research that suggests wildlife is thriving
throughout much of the exclusion zone.
Chernobyl's wolves, she says, are a particularly striking example.
"After
15 years of studying them, we have a lot of information about their
behaviour," Maryna explains. "And the Chernobyl wolf is one of the most
natural wolves in Ukraine."
By "natural", she means there is very little "human
food" in the wolves' diet. "Usually, wolves are around settlements,"
Maryna explains. "They can eat livestock, crops and waste food - even
pets."
But not here where wolves hunt wild prey.
Chernobyl's
wolves feed on deer and even catch fish. Some images - caught by camera
traps - reveal gentler dietary habits. Wolves have been snapped eating
fruit from around trees that used to be in people's orchards.
There is one group of animals that has made the zone its home and that - strictly speaking- should not really be here.
In 1998, Ukrainian zoologists released a herd of 30
endangered Przewalski's horses in the zone. The apparent aim was for the
horses to graze overgrowth and reduce the risk of wildfire. There are
now about 60 of them - in herds dispersed across Ukraine and Belarus.
They
are native to the open plains of Mongolia, so forests peppered with
abandoned buildings should not be ideal habitat. "But they're really
using the forests," explains Maryna. "We even put camera traps in old
barns and buildings and they're using them to [shelter] from mosquitoes
and heat.
"They even lay down and sleep inside - they're adapting to the zone."
'You can have the cherry vodka; I made it'
Wildlife
might be making the most of what's gradually become a post-human nature
reserve, but not every village was left for animals to claim. Some
people still live here - deep in the 30km zone.
Today is her 78th birthday. She is expecting us and has prepared a celebratory breakfast.
Maria ushers me, Jim, his colleague Mike, and our interpreter Denis to a wooden table under a fruit tree.
It
is a gloriously sunny day and pleasantly warm even at 9am. Maria starts
to bring food - fatty salted bacon, a whole fish, sliced sausage and
steaming hot, home-grown potatoes. There are two bottles of what appear
to be spirits - one colourless, one dark red.
"If you don't like this vodka, you can have the cherry one - I made it," she says.
Maria
and her neighbours make up a tiny community of just 15. Each of these
self-settlers, as they are known, travelled back across a patchily
enforced exclusion zone boundary and reclaimed their homes in 1986.
Almost every family forced to leave here was given
an apartment in a nearby town or city. For Maria and her mother, though,
this cottage, with the garden wrapped around it, was home.
They refused
to abandon it."We weren't allowed to come back, but I followed
my mum," Maria recalls. "She was 88 back then. She kept saying: 'I will
go, I will go'. I just followed her."
There are about 200
self-settlers in total living in the zone and, for an ageing population
cut off from the rest of the country, Maria says life is not easy.
"We're all very old," she tells me. "And we take each day as it comes.
"I
feel full of life when my children come to visit me from Kiev.
Otherwise, it's not so interesting to live here. But you know this is
our land - our motherland. It's irreplaceable."
Maria's mobile
phone rings and I am struck by the incongruity of our diminutive
babushka hostess, standing in her exclusion zone garden, apparently
trying to wrap up swiftly a call from her daughter. She is busy with her
visitors from the BBC!
Remote as it is, this is a close
community. As we sit in the garden (knocking back cherry vodka at our
Maria's repeated insistence) her neighbour arrives with a birthday gift.
She sits on the bench near the garden gate; she can't walk too far.
The self-settlers are a tiny minority, though. Most people who so suddenly lost their homes here have no hope of coming back.
Most of them lived in Pripyat - a true Soviet dream
town, purpose-built for the power plant workers. Just a few kilometres
from the plant itself, this town of 50,000 people was emptied overnight.
No-one was allowed to return; it is now the archetype of a 20th Century
ghost city.
Pripyat was, however, recently deemed safe to visit
for short periods and has now become one of Ukraine's most talked about
tourist attractions. An estimated 60,000 people visited the exclusion
zone last year, keen to witness the dramatic decay.
Its bleak notoriety has made it the subject of some
dark, social media-based showing-off. Search #chernobyl on Instagram and
you will find - among the interesting landscapes and tourist snaps -
images of anonymous, costumed characters, sometimes wearing gas masks or
holding up creepy-looking dolls for the camera.
'Tell people Chernobyl is not such a horrible place'
The town of Chernobyl itself - somewhat confusingly
much further from the power plant than Pripyat - is in a less
contaminated area. It has become a relatively populous hub. Power plant
decommissioning staff, scientists and tourists stay here.
Gennady,
Jim, me and the rest of the research team are staying in one of its
small hotels - a Soviet-style building with an incongruously pretty,
well-tended garden around it. This greenery is looked after by Irina,
who manages the hotel. She stays here for three months at a time before a
colleague takes over. People are only permitted to live in the town for
limited periods.
Over a cup of tea on our second evening at the
hotel, Gennady translates as Irina tells us about her memories of the
accident. She lived in Pripyat at the time with her grandmother.
On 27 April - a day after the explosion - the town
was evacuated. People were ordered to leave immediately. They lined up
for buses that would take them away from the town and the plant. Irina
was on her way back to her grandmother's apartment at the time.
"A
friend of my grandmother's was driving a cattle wagon - taking his
livestock out," she recalled. "My grandmother asked if he would take me
with him, so I climbed on to the cattle wagon.
"I didn't know what was happening."
But Irina, not unlike Maria, felt a need to return
to the zone. She has never been back to Pripyat, though; it would upset
her too much to see it now. But she takes pride in tending the flowers
around her Chernobyl hotel.
"I like to make it as pretty as
possible for the visitors," she tells me. "So maybe you can tell people
back home that Chernobyl is not such a horrible place."
'We have forgotten that we are Chernobyl people'
Gennady's
33 years working in the exclusion zone might have been leading up to
one meeting at the end of this week. It is being held in a school in
Narodichi, the town in the outer zone.
Here, scientists, community members, medical experts
and officials from the state agency that manages the exclusion zone are
gathering to discuss a change that could transform this district's
future.
For the first time since the boundary was drawn, the zone
is set to change. Three decades of research have concluded that much of
it is safe - for food to be grown and for the land to be developed.
Narodichi is one of its least contaminated places.
Jim and
Gennady are presenting their conclusions at the meeting. Before it is
under way, I have arranged to visit the town's kindergarten, where the
children are playing outside in the sunshine.
A rainbow-painted
picket fence at the edge of their playground contrasts almost
ludicrously with grey, half-built tower blocks next door.
There
were 360 children here before the accident. Tatiana Kravchenko, a woman
with a perpetual kind smile and who is wearing a thick, bright pink
coat, is the kindergarten manager. She remembers the evacuation.
"The
children were evacuated together with teachers to 'clean zones'," she
recalls. "In three months we were sent back, and we had only 25
children. Eventually, people have come back, new children have been born
and gradually the kindergarten started filling up again. Now we have
130 children here."
Most of the time, Tatiana says, she does not think
of her community as being within the exclusion zone. "We forget that we
are Chernobyl people; we have other issues to deal with," she tells me.
"It's no secret that half of the parents [of these kids] are unemployed,
because there is nowhere to work. I wish that we could build something
here - that our community could start to bloom."
'Maybe it's time to redraw the map'
Back
in the meeting, Gennady peers over red-rimmed glasses, attentively
listening to what is being said. Discussions are taking longer than
expected. Much of the community input seems to reflect Tatiana's
thoughts - that it is time for restrictions to be lifted here.
But there is a lot at stake.
People affected by the accident receive financial
compensation from the government. Here, in a town of high unemployment,
in a country where the average wage is less than 400USD per month, that
income is important.
And many still fear Chernobyl radiation - and
the effect that it might still have on their health, and the health of
their children. After many years of research, understanding and
explaining the long-term health legacy of the accident has been
infuriatingly complicated.
It is conclusive that around 5,000
cases of thyroid cancer - most of which were treated and cured - were
caused by the contamination. Authorities failed to prevent contaminated
milk from being sold in the region; many who were children at the time
drank it receiving large doses of radioactive iodine.
That was one of
the contaminants blasted out of the reactor.
Many suspect that the radiation has or will cause other cancers, but the evidence is patchy.
Prof
Richard Wakeford, from the University of Manchester's Centre for
Occupational and Environmental Health, points out that health studies
look for a "signal" of a specific health effect linked to Chernobyl.
They
aim to pick out that signal above the "background noise" from other
causes. That has been incredibly difficult, primarily because of the
huge background noise that was the almost simultaneous upheaval of the
Soviet Union's collapse.
"It's assumed that there will be some
cancers linked to the accident in addition to the thyroid cancers, but
detecting them amid that socioeconomic chaos - that had its own impacts
on people's health - has proven almost impossible," says Prof Wakeford.
Cancer also affects between a third and a half of people in Europe, so
any Chernobyl signal is likely to be small.
Amid reports of other health problems - including birth defects - it still is not clear if any can be attributed to radiation.
Prof Geraldine Thomas from Imperial College London
explains: "Another confounding factor in this part of the world relates,
confusingly, to iodine deficiency."
In its non-radioactive
form, iodine is found in milk, green leafy vegetables and seaweed. A
lack of it in the diet is a known cause of problems in the early
development of the brain and spinal cord. "So one possible cause of
birth defects is actually a lack of iodine in the environment," the prof
says.
All of this means that estimates of cancer cases remain highly contentious.
In
its seminal 2006 report on the the long-term consequences of the
accident, the World Health Organization did conclude that many people's
mental health has been damaged - by fear of radiation and severe
disruption to their lives.
As a scientist who has spent years
scrutinising the truth about the contamination in the zone, Gennady
admits that he did not expect the people of Narodichi to be afraid of
radiation.
"It's a very big factor affecting their lives, even
more than 30 years after the accident. This is really something that
surprised me," he says.
That fear can be physically as well as mentally damaging.
A
sense of fatalism and hopelessness associated with assumptions of being
doomed by radiation is thought to contribute to higher rates of of
smoking and alcoholism in this region - both of which are definitively
bad for people's health.
"It was a terrible thing that happened here," says Jim. "But that tends to dominate people's lives.
"Somehow
- and it's very, very difficult - we've got to move towards a situation
where people can go back to living their lives without this fear, this
radiation blight."
We're not going anywhere
Gennady
emerges from the meeting looking a little jaded, but he says he is
cautiously optimistic. The map was not officially redrawn today, but,
crucially, most people in the room agreed there was a need for change.
"The community wants to bring more life here,"
Gennady says. "And we, as scientists, know that a lot of places here can
be easily excluded from this ban, so I think this was a very positive
moment."
At the kindergarten, Tatiana has ushered the younger children inside for an afternoon nap.
There are rows of adorably tiny beds inside a new wing of the kindergarten that was built with money from a Japanese charity.
The
close relationship between Japan and Ukraine has been forged by the
former being in the early stages of understanding the impact of its own
nuclear disaster - at the Fukushima power plant.
Looking from the
pristine new kindergarten building to the neighbouring derelict block,
she says she would support the town's removal from the zone.
"These houses could be reconstructed and filled with people. We dream about that.
"We live here. We are not going to leave for anywhere else. Our children live here."
By BBC Science Correspondent Victoria Gill. Photographs by Jemma Cox. Graphics by Lilly Huynh and Sana Jasemi.
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