News & Articles

“For the second time since the [AChernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said. … The amount of iodine-131 in the air also increased slightly [May 19] after several days of decline, health officials said.”  — “Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, May 22, 1986
“… low levels of radiation have been discovered in a sample of raw milk from a Minnesota dairy, state health officials said [May 16]. Since radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident began floating over Minnesota last week …”  — Kate Parry, “Low radiation dose found in area milk,” Mpls StarTribune, May 17, 1986
“State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.”  — Associated Press, May 15, 1986
“Although it was the countries of Europe that were most affected by the Chernobyl accident, the radioactive materials became dispersed throughout the northern hemisphere…”  — UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, “Sources, Effects and Risks of Ionizing Radiation,” 1988 Report to the General Assembly.
US government warnings of Chernobyl’s fallout are nearly forgotten, but a May 14, 1986 bulletin from the Environmental Protection Agency said, “[A]irborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States.”
Likewise in 2011, “Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the EPA late Friday [April 8].” — Forbes magazine, April 11, 2011.

Contamination Still Blowing in the Wind

This week the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster is being remembered, unhappily, the world over. In Germany, the ancient custom of wild boar hunting continues to be forbidden because the animals are still too radioactive. Twenty-nine years after the Russian reactor exploded and burned out of control for weeksand demonstrated nuclear power’s whole-earth poisoningthe catastrophic consequences are still spreading.
The dispersion of large amounts of radioactive cesium-137 which persists in the environment for at least 300 years and emits beta radiationwas especially concentrated in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Half the spewed radiation fell across these three states; the other half spread around the Northern Hemisphere.
Cesium has concentrated in forested areas of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 1,000 square miles surrounding the reactor site where access and habitation are severely limited. When the forests catch fire in the dry seasons, absorbed radioactive materials like cesium are dispersed to the winds.
For two months in the summer of 2010, wildfires in Russia burned over two million acres and caused at least 50 deaths. The August 10, 2010 New York Times noted that “dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones.” And on August 12, the AP and the Agency France Presse cited government reports that at least six wildfires had been extinguished “this week” in the heavily contaminated Bryansk region.
Time later reported about the 2010 wildfires that Russian leaders had removed maps of likely radiation-contaminated fires from web sites maintained by the government forestry agency. (Taking a lesson from the Russians, the US government halted emergency sea-water and air radiation monitoring on the West Coast only two months after the start of Fukushima’s three meltdowns in March 2011.)
In 2002, dozens of peat fires and wildfires spread across heavily-contaminated Belarus. The AP reported July 22, 2002 that “Belarusian Emergency Minister Valery Astapov said radiation levels in the fire zone are elevated, though he did not say by how much.”
The Washington Post and AP reported in April 1996 that a wildfire had “spread quickly through five villages in the exclusion zone, carried by strong winds blowing toward Kiev and its 2.6 million residents. It burned pines and buildings in one of the areas most heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium.”
The American Geophysical Union reported finding in 2009 that the radioactive cesium-137 dispersed by Chernobyl is not decaying as quickly as predicted, and estimated that dangerous carcinogen wouldn’t “disappear” from the environment through decay for up to 320 years.
The latest news of cesium spreading from poisoned wood, comes from a team of researchers led by Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. Forest covered just 50 % the exclusion zone before the 1986, but trees and brush now cover 70 % of the area — about four times the size of New York City. The scientists report that wildfires are expected to rage more often and more fiercly as climate change heats and dries the region.
According to their Dr. Mousseau, as published in Ecological Monographs, wildfires that burned in the exclusion zone in 2002, 2008 and 2010 have together redistributed approximately 8% of the original amount of cesium-137 released in the 1986 disaster.
the researchers warned that large blazes in the future could spread significant amounts of radioactive soot across Europe, leading to contamination of food crops.
Asked by the New York Times what the effects might be, Dr. Mousseau said, “There is never a positive consequence of having increased amounts of mutagenic materials in our environment. It’s always negative.”