In a bizarre twist brought about by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Pripyat (((1985: population 50,000))) is getting a new lease on life. People will never move back into the deteriorating Soviet-era apartments. Instead, scientists are planning to use the radioactive ghost town as a unique laboratory for modeling the dispersal of radionuclides by the detonation of a dirty bomb. [Article from Science: PDF]
Will people never live there again? 24,000 years from now – if the zone’s keepers are right, and if the reactor’s extra-human carcinogenic hell raising center is safely interred, not having leaked into the River Dneiper, then half of the plutonium 239 buried at Chernobyl will still be there. If this does not inspire the journalist to capitalize the designation never, can it ever in good grammar suffer such aggrandizement? To capitalize a letter out of turn, what is this act of writing? The shortest answer would be for emphasis. But to do so to a common word is to possibly conflate it with a Proper noun (if this is the case, then what the hell is an iPhone?). Is such a conflation desirable under any circumstance? What would the proper noun Never refer to? Is it a collective will of humanity? A hope for a collective will expressed by an author? But who except the most depraved amongst the humans would contradict a foreclosure of such disaster? Is this not a natural position of the human? An indelible position that suffers no history and knows no abberation?
Well let US meditate on the matter, recalling the facts at hand:
Nobody has to twist the facts of Chernobyl. One by one the Ukrainian, Belarus and Russian health chiefs recite their litanies of loss. The figures are on an unimaginable scale. Some 23 per cent of the land of Belarus is contaminated, and on that land live 20 per cent of the population. More than 250,000 hectares of farmland have been closed down; 130,000 have had to be resettled.
Childhood thyroid cancer is 90 times the levels before 1986. There will be 140 cases of thyroid cancer every year. Breast cancer is on the increase; so are disorders of the blood circulation. Almost 2 million people in 3,331 towns and villages need “special attention”. The republic needs “clean” food, diagnostic equipment, radiation instruments and rehabilitation centres, and will need to spend $400-500m between now and 1995.
The Ukrainians tell a similar story: 190 people have acute radiation sickness; 20,000 have lost the capacity to work; there are 130,000 evacuees; there are 1.5 million children whose thyroid glands received radiation doses. There are people with respiratory disease, heart troubles and nervous system disorders. There are increased digestive problems, tonsilitis, anaemia and stress. There is an increase in suicide. There are children with “Chernobyl syndrome”.
The Russians, too, tell of 2.6 million people in 7,608 contaminated towns; of a 25 per cent increase in tumours; of a 50 per cent increase in cardiovascular disorders; of locomotor apparatus diseases.
Scientists refer to the zone as a “unique laboratory” and scientists from 28 nations have worked there. But it is difficult to feel objective about it. Here is a landscape so contaminated by its only heavy industry that it has been turned inside out: used as its own graveyard, buried within itself. Most of the iodine 131 disappeared long ago. In another 20 years, the strontium 90 will have fallen to half its original burden. In another 20 years, half of the caesium 137 will have disintegrated.
But 24,000 years from now – if the zone’s keepers are right, and the stuff is safely interred, and hasn’t leaked into the River Dneiper – half of the plutonium 239 buried in it will still be there. [link]
An abandoned village house near Chernobyl
There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries.
“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.
“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986. [link]
The Red Forest is located in the “zone of alienation”: this area received the highest doses of radiation from the Chernobyl accident and the resulting clouds of smoke and dust. The name ‘Red Forest’ comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of radiation from the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986. In the post-disaster cleanup operations, the Red Forest was bulldozed and buried into ‘waste graveyards’. The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor contaminated the soil, water and atmosphere with the radiation equivalent to 20 of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
