Radioactive wild boar spark concerns in Sweden 31 years after Chernobyl

Radiation levels are expected to rise.

Fears are growing in Sweden over packs of radioactive wild boar moving north across the country.

One animal shot by hunters was found to have more than 10 times the safe level of radiation.

The high radiation levels - which come 31 years after the Chernobyl disaster sent a cloud of radioactive dust over Sweden - have left hunters afraid to kill and eat the animals.

Ulf Frykman, who works for the environmental consultancy Calluna, this week issued an alert to local hunters in the country of Gävle, about 100 miles north of Stockholm, warning them of "extremely high" radiation levels among local boar.

"This is the highest level we've ever measured," he told the Telegraph, after testing an animal in Tärnsjö, a village between the cities of Uppsala and Gävle, with a radiation level of 16,000 becquerel per kilogram (Bq/kg).

Of the 30 samples of boar his team have tested this year, only six have been below the safe limit of 1,500 Bq/kg.

As the soil in some areas north of Tärnsjö are more than twice as contaminated, radiation levels among boar are only expected to rise, the Telegraph reported.

"When they reach our worst areas, we're expecting maybe 40,000 Bq/kg - that's starting to look like 1986 for us all over again," Mr Frykman said.

Wild boars' feeding habits mean they have a greater exposure to the iodine and caesium-137 left by the 1986 disaster than other game animals.

"Wild boar root around in the earth searching for food, and all the caesium stays in the ground," Mr Frykman explained. "If you look at deer and elk, they eat up in the bushes and you do not have not so much caesium there."

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine released roughly four hundred times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The remnants of beds are seen in an abandoned in a pre school in the deserted town of Pripyat in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Photo / Getty

Areas in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were the worst hit, but a cloud of radioactive particles also drifted over central and northern Sweden and it was workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power plant, near Gävle, who were the first to raise the alarm internationally.

In the months following the accident, some deer around Gävle were found to have radiation levels of 50,000 Bq/kg.

Wild boar have been moving gradually north through Sweden over recent decades, since being reintroduced to the south of the country in the 1970s, some 200 years after they were eradicated.

Farmers fear that the high level of radiation in the animals will stop hunters shooting them, causing the population to spiral out of control, damaging forests and crops.

Mia Brodin, who is on the board of the local farmers' association, said that radioactive boars were already causing problems.

"There are more and more of them, and when they come, they come in large numbers," she said. "They dig deep holes in the fields, and then you destroy your tractor. The crops are destroyed and they eat food you put out for your livestock."