The "zone of alienation": a thriving radioactive wilderness (04/23/06)

THE 20th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHORNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER

The "zone of alienation": a thriving radioactive wilderness

by Mary Mycio

The wild Przewalski's horses were grazing on last year's dried grass when an NBC News film crew drove by in early April. The cameraman leaped out of the van to film the horses, dramatically framed by the sarcophagus that has covered Chornobyl's No. 4 reactor since soon after it exploded on April 26, 1986, and burned for 10 days. The unprecedented disaster spewed the radioactive equivalent of 20 Hiroshima bombs around the globe and defiled the surrounding countryside with heavy contamination.

The small herd was wary. The stallion and alpha mare kept a close watch on the cameraman - and me, as I slowly approached them to take some pictures. A species apart from domestic horses, Przewalski's horses can be vicious, attacking if threatened.

Extinct in the wild since the 1960s, Przewalski's horses are a captive breeding success story. Nearly 1,500 have been bred worldwide - many of them at Ukraine's Askania Nova reserve. Today, there are enough horses to start releasing them into natural habitats. The main problem has been finding places where they won't disturb people, trampling farmland, and where people won't disturb them.

One of those places has been the zone of alienation (also known as the exclusion zone) surrounding the Chornobyl reactor. About 135,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometer zone established around the reactor in the first few months. More people were resettled from contaminated patches in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in the ensuing years, for a total of 350,000.

They were not Chornobyl's only human victims - or survivors, depending on one's point of view. Nearly 900,000 liquidators worked on the clean-up, and not all of them were volunteers. How the disaster affected the evacuees' and liquidators' health is a matter of some controversy. But no one disputes that the disaster - compounded by the Soviets' failure to warn the affected populations - has caused nearly 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer (with thousands more still to come), mostly in people who were children at the time of the disaster.

Chornobyl's psychological effects also linger, even among people who were not significantly affected by radiation. Studies comparing people who live in the contaminated regions to people in "clean" areas found that both groups consider Chornobyl to be their No. 1 health problem. That conviction, in turn, can cause stress, fatalism, depression. As one Ukrainian expert said when asked about the various ailments people blame on the disaster: "Are they sick because of radiation? No. Are they sick because of Chornobyl? Yes."

In short, the disaster's human consequences are grim and should not be underestimated - though in the renewed debates over nuclear energy, they must be kept in perspective and compared to the human costs of other forms of energy, especially fossil fuels.

But Chornobyl has not been quite the environmental disaster everyone predicted and most people still imagine. Far from being dead, the zone of alienation is very much alive. In fact, by forcing people to abandon a contiguous area of nearly 2,000 square miles, or the size of two Rhode Islands, straddling the border between Ukraine and Belarus, radiation has paradoxically allowed nature to thrive.

Populations of large animals such as moose, wild boar and deer have rebounded, together with the predators that keep their populations in check. During more than 20 visits to the zone, I've seen wolves in broad daylight and heard the call of an endangered lynx at nightfall. I've become a good enough tracker to probably qualify for a Plast merit badge.

Biologist Igor Chyzhevski has been studying the wild animals since the early 1990s, when he used to go hunting with European scientists studying how much radioactivity game animals were accumulating (their conclusion: quite a lot).

"There are no mutants," he insisted, when I asked him the same question nearly everyone poses to me, about two-headed moose and six-legged boars. "If deformed animals are born in the wild, they die. Scavengers dispose of them before anyone can find them."

Like their unexpectedly inviting habitat, the animals are also radioactive. Cesium-137, which chemically mimics potassium, packs in their muscles. Strontium-90, which imitates calcium, collects in their bones. Birds also collect strontium-90 in their eggshells. But the benefits of the human-free environment seem to be outweighing what negative effects there may be from radiation.

If the animals live long enough to reproduce, they are considered biologically successful - even if they may be dying earlier because of radiation-related diseases. Some creatures' fertility also may be depressed. For example, great tits nesting in very radioactive areas lay misshapen eggs that often fail to hatch.

Nevertheless, birds are far more plentiful inside the zone than outside it. There are some 280 species, including rarities like black storks and white-tailed eagles. Since the health of an animal population is measured by its size, not by the health of its individual members, Chornobyl's creatures are healthy indeed.

That's why Askania Nova scientists Natalia Yasenetska and Tetiana Zharkikh decided that the zone was the best place in Ukraine to experimentally release Przewalski's horses. In 1999, 21 horses were released into the wild, though the program met with fierce opposition. Some scientists were concerned that the horses, a steppe species, would be unable to adapt to the zone's forested and swampy terrain. But the program went forward, though it somewhat resembled an equine soap opera to which I devote an entire chapter in "Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl."

Originally, there were two family groups, called harems, of mares, youngsters and a stallion. There was also a group of bachelor stallions that was on a constant prowl for unattached mares, including domestic mares in the zone's various agencies and services. Over the years, the herds expanded steadily.

Mature colts and fillies were expelled from their family groups. Colts joined bachelor herds, while more mature bachelors fought each other for the young mares, forming new harems that allow more stallions to contribute to the Chornobyl horses' gene pool.

Today, there are five family herds, as well as some bachelors. On their last trip to the zone in March, Mmes. Yasynetska and Zharkikh counted 63 horses, which is a tripling of the original number released. That may seem like a lot, but based on the Przewalski's horses' past reproductive rates, they calculate that there should actually be 96 horses. That means that a huge number of horses - over one-third - either died, or never born.

Did that mean the release program's opponents were right? Or could it be that radiation was affecting the horses' health?

When I asked Ms. Zharkikh, she was cautious in her response. But after studying the evidence, her answer was direct, dire - and depressing.

"The horses are being poached," she said, adding, "massively." The scientists uncovered clear evidence of eight horses that were poached, plus one more horse about which they aren't certain. Of course, poachers don't usually leave evidence and clearly many of the other "missing" Przewalski's horses are making it into trophy rooms and sausage factories.

Poaching has always been a problem in the zone. But if a handful of wild boars or roe deer are killed, it little affects their Chornobyl populations - which number in the many thousands. Poaching of moose and elk, which are protected species, has more serious implications, but not quite as serious as killing even a few Przewalski's horses. They may number 1,500 worldwide but there are only about 150 in Ukraine. It is a very fragile population.

Hunting is forbidden in the zone to protect people from radioactive game, and not to protect the animals from people. That prohibition is what has made the zone a de facto wildlife sanctuary. But there is no particular punishment for poaching there. It is treated like poaching anywhere in Ukraine.

The massive killing off of Przewalski's horses shows that it is time to make the zone an official wildlife sanctuary, with the highest levels of legal protection and security. Poachers should suffer stiff fines and criminal liability. The zone may also qualify as a United Nations' Biospheric Reserve or a World Heritage site, which would make it eligible for certain international aid.

The zone of alienation has become a vast, beautiful and thriving radioactive wilderness. There is nothing else like it on the planet. It demands protection.

Mary Mycio is the author of "Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl" (Joseph Henry Press, 2005). Readers can visit the official website at www.chernobyl.in.ua.

| Home Page |