The Mystery of Chernobyl

Published on
The Telegraph/UK

The Mystery of Chernobyl

A bitter dispute is raging over whether the fallout zone is a wasteland or wonderland. Now, a team of scientists is heading back into the contaminated area to find out the truth.

Sanjida O'Connell

The 30-mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the abandoned town of Pripyat is now home to animals (Photo: Reuters)

'We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had
it's how Tim Mousseau describes his first visit to Chernobyl.

Carolina travelled to the site of the world's most horrific nuclear
accident, alongside Professor Anders Møller, an ornithologist and
evolutionary biologist from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

The basic facts of Chernobyl are well known. At 1.23am on April 26, 1986,
reactor number four at the Soviet nuclear power plant (sited in modern-day
Ukraine) exploded, after an electrical test went horribly wrong. The
radioactive material released was hundreds of times greater than the fallout
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, polluting about 80,000 square miles of land
across Europe and spreading radioactive rain as far as north-west Ireland.

through the deserted streets, and swifts swoop round abandoned office

world "would welcome nuclear waste as the perfect guardian against
greedy developers… the preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites
other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by
hungry farmers and developers".

According to a UN report in 2005, long-term cancers caused by Chernobyl will
eventually kill about 4,000 people: an alarming total, but less than
predicted. In fact, in an age of "dirty bombs" and nuclear proliferation, Chernobyl
functions as a grim experiment into the consequences of extensive nuclear
fallout. Although radiation levels have dropped significantly over the 23
years, there are still "hot" regions. Prof Mousseau says that the
most contaminated areas measure 300 microSieverts per hour on the Geiger
counter, the equivalent of 1,200 times normal radiation levels, or 15 times
as much as a chest X-ray. "Long-term exposure would be deleterious,"
he adds drily.

The real problem, however, is environmental contamination of radionucleotides,
caesium, strontium, and plutonium, which have half-lives of 30,000, 29,000
and 24,000 years respectively. Since this means that over that time period,
these chemicals will decay to half their previous concentrations, they will
contaminate the land for years.

"What you need to worry about is eating the food, because ingestion is
the main way that one becomes exposed to radiation poisoning here,"
says Prof Mousseau.

And despite the stories about nature thriving in the Chernobyl area, Prof
Mousseau is not convinced. The first discovery that he and Prof Møller made
was that birds in the fallout zone were suffering increased levels of
genetic mutations. The pair examined 20,000 barn swallows and found crippled
toes, deformed beaks, malformed tails, irregularly shaped eyes and tumours.
Some birds had red plumage where it should have been blue, or blue where it
should have been red.

Thanks to the contamination of the food supply, bird species have declined by
more than 50 per cent in high-radiation areas. Only a fraction of the
swallows are reproducing, and of those that do lay eggs, only five per cent
hatch. Fewer than a third of birds survive to become adults. Prof Mousseau
and Prof Møller could confirm that these abnormalities were genetic by
examining the swallows' sperm.

One of the pair's most interesting findings, outlined in a paper last year, is
the connection between antioxidants, radiation and plumage colour: in other
words, birds with the brightest plumage are more likely to die.

The explanation is simple. In humans and birds, antioxidants help to quash the
effects of radiation. "Birds that migrate long distances and have bright plumage, such as swallows, have a very high metabolic rate and
produce a lot of free radicals as a by-product, which damage their tissues,"
says Prof Mousseau.

"They then use stockpiles of antioxidants in their blood and liver to
offset this potential damage. Females allocate large amounts of antioxidants
to their eggs, which is the reason why the yolk is bright yellow."

But at the end of the birds' migration route, their energy reserves need to be
replenished. "What appears to be happening is that in highly
contaminated areas, they simply can't do this." As a result, swallows
and great tits are unable to maintain their bright plumage and channel
sufficient antioxidants into their eggs, and few chicks hatch.

The insects that they feed on are suffering, too. In the most contaminated
areas, there are fewer butterflies, bumblebees, grasshoppers, dragonflies
and spiders. "The fact that insects, including pollinators, are
sensitive to elevated contaminants has a significant impact on the rest of
the ecosystem," says Prof Mousseau.

It seems like a portrait of an ecosystem in crisis – so how have other
scientists reported the opposite? Dr Robert Baker and Dr Ronald Chesser,
from Texas Tech University, conducted their own study, published in the
journal American Scientist in 2006: "We were surprised by the
diversity of mammals living in the shadow of the ruined reactor only eight
years after meltdown."

Their long-term studies contradicted those of Professors Mousseau and Møller,
describing the region as "thriving", with a wild boar population
10 to 15 times higher in the exclusion zone than outside. They also failed
to find any type of elevated mutation rate, or evidence that survival among
animals living around Chernobyl differs from those in clean environments.

"Chernobyl is not a lunar landscape," says Prof Mousseau. "You
can hear birds and mammals, spot the occasional wolf and fox, there are
trees and plants – so it's not a complete desert. The reason for this
misunderstanding is because there is a quiltwork of contamination, so you
could have lots of organisms in one area, and none in another. To a trained
biologist, though, it's very obvious."

Those are fighting words – particularly as both teams will shortly publish
papers about mammals in the region that have diametrically opposed results.

For his part, Dr Chesser says: "I think that the discrepancy between our
work and that of Møller and Mousseau stems from their inattention to
details. I will go no further than that. I have no doubt that our work is

Prof Mousseau is equally forthright: "I'd rather avoid discussing
specifics of their work, but no other folks apart from us have been
rigorously counting organisms and measuring their distribution and the
background contamination. Their work is based on anecdotes."

Regardless of who is right or wrong, there is another tragedy here. Prof
Mousseau has started working with the Hospital for Radiation Biology, in
Kiev, on a long-term study of humans who live in the area: more than 11,000
adults and 2,000 children in the Narodichesky region, 50 miles from

Prof Mousseau says that the incidence among locals of cancer, birth defects
and reduced lifespan is alarmingly high.

"There is a growing mountain of information that all points to
significant consequences to the human population of chronic radiation
exposure," he warns. "What will be the consequences for the
children of these children?"

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