Return to fields of Chernobyl

Anyone for some Chernobyl mushrooms? It might sound like a tasteless joke, but if the Ukrainian authorities have their way, the fields surrounding the infamous nuclear reactor could soon be growing fruit and vegetables.

After the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, the Soviet authorities closed off land within a 30km radius of the blast, evacuating all the residents. The zone is still out of bounds today.

Other large areas of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were also contaminated by the fallout, and growing produce on this land is still not permitted. Regular monitoring of produce from fields near Chernobyl sold at markets in Ukraine and western Russia still goes on.

But some Ukrainian officials feel it is time to start a rehabilitation process for the land affected. Studies are taking place to determine "which bits of territory we can use partially for agriculture and which we can use fully", a Ukrainian official, Mikhail Bolotskikh, told Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

The Government was quick to clarify that the studies did not concern the inner 30km zone.

"We're talking about the places where people are already living; the places that are not closed off," said Svetlana Borodina, an Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman. "We're not yet looking at particular crops that could be grown there, but we just want to work out whether this land can be used at all."

A report will be published next March, before the disaster's 25th anniversary in April.

One plan previously mooted involved growing rapeseed rather than edible crops in the areas. Rapeseed can be used to make biofuels and is resistant to radiation.

Scientists were split over the plan. Some said that in areas where intensive rehabilitation programmes had been done, soil-radiation levels could be reduced to near-normal levels, but others said disturbing the land would risk catastrophe.

"It is simply a crime - increasing air and water pollution by turning over polluted soil," a former official with the country's radiation and ecology watchdog told the Russian newspaper.

After denying anything serious was wrong in the first hours after the disaster, the Soviet authorities eventually evacuated thousands from areas around the reactor, including the town of Pripyat, which had 50,000 residents.

The reactor burnt for 10 days and spewed out about 100 times more radioactive material than the two atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Now, only a few hundred people live inside the exclusion zone permanently, mostly pensioners who decided to risk contamination and return to their old homes illegally.

But the wider area is more heavily populated. In 2007, the UN General Assembly issued a resolution on Chernobyl, stating the "emergency phase" was over and it was time to move to the "recovery phase".

At the time, it was said 20 years of treating the residents of affected areas as victims had led to a culture of apathy and that, in many areas, alcoholism and smoking now posed a greater cancer threat than radiation.

Another plan to revive some kind of life in the inner zone is to promote tourism. Already, specialised agencies run occasional day tours for nostalgic former residents and foreign tourists with an interest in seeing one of the world's disaster sites.

One firm instructs tourists that in the zone they may not eat or smoke outdoors, touch buildings or vegetation, or wear anything that exposes skin, such as skirts or sandals.

9000:

World Health Organisation estimate of deaths as a result of exposure to radiation released by the Chernobyl explosion. Other estimates put the figure much higher. Greenpeace has suggested that the accident could eventually be responsible for more than 250,000 cancer cases.

300,000:

People living near the reactor were evacuated, including the entire town of Pripyat, which had 50,000 residents.

- INDEPENDENT