Chernobyl shows nature will stroll in wherever man fears to tread

Nature is slowly reclaiming the town of Pripyat, just two miles from Chernobyl reactor number four. Picture / Reuters

Near what is left of Chernobyl's ill-fated fourth reactor, a pair of elks is grazing nonchalantly on land irradiated by the world's worst nuclear accident.

In nearby Pripyat, an eerie husk of a town where 50,000 people lived before they were forced to flee on a terrifying afternoon in 1986, a Soviet urban landscape is rapidly giving way to wild European woodland.

Radiation levels remain far too high for human habitation, but the abandoned town is filled with birdsong. Twenty years after the reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all.

The zone - an area with a radius of 29 kilometres in modern-day Ukraine - lives on in the popular imagination as a post-apocalyptic wasteland irreparably poisoned with strontium and caesium. It is associated with death and alarming yet nebulous stories of genetic mutation, a post-nuclear badland that shows what happens when mankind gets atomic energy wrong.

The reality, at least on the surface, is starkly different from the mythology, however. The almost complete absence of human activity in large swaths of the zone during the past two decades has given the area's flora and fauna a chance to first recover and then to flourish.

The picture is complicated by the fact that the true human cost of the tragedy and the damage wreaked on people's health by the radioactive cloud emitted after the explosion may never be fully known.

Estimates of human fatalities, both direct and indirect, vary wildly, from 41 in the immediate aftermath to tens of thousands in the years that followed. It is estimated that 5 million people were exposed to radiation in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and that the radiation fallout - equivalent to 400 Hiroshimas - triggered an epidemic of thyroid cancer that has yet to abate.

In the dead zone's so-called Red Forest, a pine forest that took the brunt of the radioactive explosion, radiation levels today can be as high as one roentgen, more than 50,000 times normal background levels.

Elsewhere, however, levels are much lower - to the point where large animals such as elks, wild horses and wild boars appear to be enjoying normal life spans.

Some claim it is one of Europe's most promising wildlife havens.

Most of the animals, with the exception of the herds of wild Przewalski's horses brought in to gnaw on radioactive grass to guard against forest fires, appear to have returned to the zone of their own accord. The most recent count by the authorities showed that the zone (including a larger contaminated area in neighbouring Belarus) is home to 66 species of mammals.

The area was also estimated to be home to 280 species of birds, many of them rare and endangered.

The only animal that appears not to have made a comeback is the bear. But ecologists say the return of large predators such as wolves is a sure sign that things are moving in the right direction.

Sergey Franchuk, a guide and local expert who has been associated with the area since 1982, says he believes the radiation has purified the soil in an inexplicable way.

"We think that the land has been cleansed," he says. "Nature is flourishing here, even more so than it was before the accident."

Mary Mycio, an American foreign correspondent in the area and a biologist, was one of the first people to begin cataloguing nature's unlikely comeback in Chernobyl and has made 24 different trips to the dead zone.

"On the surface," she says, "radiation is very good for wildlife because it forces people to leave the contaminated area. They removed 135,000 people from an area twice the size of Luxembourg ... It is a radioactive wilderness, and it is thriving."

Hunting and fishing in the dead zone is prohibited for obvious reasons and according to Franchuk there are only 337 squatters - people who obstinately refused to be resettled - living in the zone.

Mycio admits, however, that some scientists question what is happening to flora and fauna at a cellular and genetic level.

The few studies that have been done have exposed minor genetic changes in small animals and birds such as mice and barn swallows, including depressed fertility.

In a comprehensive assessment of the damage caused by the Chernobyl accident, the British ecologists Jim Smith and Nick Beresford point out that radiation levels considered potentially dangerous to humans have little if any effect on wildlife.

"Animals in the wild are less prone to cancer than human populations," they say. "They are most likely to be killed by natural predators or starvation before they reach an age at which cancer risk increases," they say.

Not all scientists accept this assessment. Anders Moller and Timothy Mousseau studied swallows in the zone and found they carry a significantly higher level of "germline" mutations in their sperm and eggs.

"Our work indicates that the worst is yet to come in the human population. The consequences for generations down the line could be greater than we've seen so far," said Mousseau, a biology professor at the University of South Carolina.

But Mycio argues that animals are adapting to living with radiation and are even building up a resistance to it. She insists there is no serious evidence of animals mutating in the zone.

"Nature's law is the survival of the fittest. In the wild, mutants die. And if they do survive, they are like the partly albino swallows that appeared in the early years after the disaster. They were not considered attractive and found it hard to mate, so their mutations didn't pass on to future generations."

- INDEPENDENT