That is unfortunate, because deep self-interment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it—and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely.
5. Hot Living
They began approaching within a year. Chernobyl’s birds disappeared in the firestorm when Reactor Number Four blew that April, their nest building barely begun. Until it detonated, Chernobyl was almost halfway to becoming the biggest nuclear complex on Earth, with a dozen one-megawatt reactors. Then, one night in 1986, a collision of operator and design mistakes achieved a kind of critical mass of human error. The explosion, although not nuclear —only one building was damaged— broadcast the innards of a nuclear reactor over the landscape and into the sky, amid an immense cloud of radioactive steam from the evaporated coolant. To Russian and Ukrainian scientists that week, frantically sampling to track radioactive plumes through the soil and aquifers, the silence of a birdless world was unnerving.
But the following spring the birds were back, and they’ve stayed. To watch barn swallows zip naked around the carcass of the hot reactor is discombobulating, especially when you are swaddled in layers of wool and hooded canvas coveralls to block alpha particles, with a surgical cap and mask to keep plutonium dust from your hair and lungs. You want them to fly away, fast and far. At the same time, it’s mesmerizing that they’re here. It seems so normal, as if apocalypse has turned out to be not so bad after all. The worst happens, and life still goes on.
Life goes on, but the baseline has changed. A number of swallows hatch with patches of albino feathers. They eat insects, fledge, and migrate normally. But the following spring, no white-flecked birds return. Were they too genetically deficient to make the winter circuit to southern Africa? Does their distinctive coloring make them unappealing to potential mates, or too noticeable to predators?
In the aftermath of Chernobyl’s explosion and fire, coal miners and subway crews tunneled underneath Number Four’s basement and poured a second concrete slab to stop the core from reaching groundwater. This probably was unnecessary, as the meltdown was over, having ended in a 200-ton puddle of frozen, murderous ooze at the bottom of the unit. During the two weeks it took to dig, workers were handed bottles of vodka, which, they were told, would inoculate them against radiation sickness. It didn’t.
At the same time, construction began on a containment housing, something that all Soviet RMBK reactors like Chernobyl lacked, because they could be refueled faster without one. By then, hundreds of tons of hot fuel had already blown onto the roofs of adjacent reactors, along with 100 to 300 times the radiation released in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Within seven years, radioactivity had eaten so many holes in the hastily built, hulking, gray five-story concrete shell, already patched and caulked like the hull of a rusting scow, that birds, rodents, and insects were nesting inside it. Rain had leaked in, and no one knew what vile brews steeped in puddles of animal droppings and warm, irradiated water.
The Zone of Alienation, a 30-kilometer-radius evacuated circle around the plant, has become the world’s biggest nuclear-waste dump. The millions of tons of buried hot refuse include an entire pine forest that died within days of the blast, which couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal. The 10-kilometer radius around ground zero, the plutonium zone, is even more restricted. Any vehicles and machinery that worked there on the cleanup, such as the giant cranes towering over the sarcophagus, are too radioactive to leave.
Yet skylarks perch on their hot steel arms, singing. Just north of the ruined reactor, pines that have re- sprouted branch in elongated, irregular runs, with needles of various lengths. Still, they’re alive and green. Beyond them, by the early 1990s, forests that survived had filled with radioactive roe deer and wild boars. Then moose arrived, and lynx and wolves followed.
Dikes have slowed radioactive water, but not stopped it from reaching the nearby Pripyat River and, farther downstream, Kiev’s drinking supply. A railroad bridge leading to Pripyat, the company town where 50,000 were evacuated—some not quickly enough to keep radioactive iodine from ruining their thyroids—is still too hot to cross. Four miles south, though, you can stand above the river in one of the best birding areas today in Europe, watching marsh hawks, black terns, wagtails, golden and white-tailed eagles, and rare black storks sail past dead cooling towers.
In Pripyat, an unlovely cluster of concrete 1970s high-rises, returning poplars, purple asters, and lilacs have split the pavement and invaded buildings. Unused asphalt streets sport a coat of moss. In surrounding villages, vacant except for a few aged peasants permitted to live out their shortened days here, stucco peels from brick houses engulfed by untrimmed shrubbery. Cottages of hewn timbers have lost roof tiles to tangles of wild grapevines and even birch saplings.
Just beyond the river is Belarus; the radiation, of course, stopped for no border. During the five-day reactor fire, the Soviet Union seeded clouds headed east so that contaminated rain wouldn’t reach Moscow. Instead, it drenched the USSR’s richest breadbasket, 100 miles from Chernobyl at the intersection of Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia’s Novozybkov region. Except for the 10-kilometer zone around the reactor, no other place received so much radiation—a fact concealed by the Soviet government lest national food panic erupt. Three years later, when researchers discovered the truth, most of Novozybkov was also evacuated, leaving fallow vast collective grain and potato fields.
The fallout, mainly cesium-137 and strontium-90, by-products of uranium fission with 30-year half-lives, will significantly irradiate Novozybkov’s soils and food chain until at least AD 2135. Until then, nothing here is safe to eat, for either humans or animals. What “safe” means is wildly debated. Estimates of the number of people who will die from cancer or blood and respiratory diseases due to Chernobyl range from 4,000 to 100,000. The lower figure comes from the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose credibility is tinged by its dual role as both the world’s atomic watchdog agency and the nuclear power industry’s trade association. The higher numbers are invoked by public health and cancer researchers and by environmental groups like Greenpeace International, all insisting that it’s too early to know, because radiation’s effects accumulate over time.
Whatever the correct measure of human mortality may be, it applies to other life-forms as well, and in a world without humans the plants and animals we leave behind will have to deal with many more Chernobyls. Little is still known about the extent of genetic harm this disaster unleashed: genetically damaged mutants usually fall to predators before scientists can count them. However, studies suggest that the survival rate of Chernobyl swallows is significantly lower than that of returning migrants of the same species elsewhere in Europe.
“The worst-case scenario,” remarks University of South Carolina biologist Tim Mousseau, who visits here often, “is that we might see extinction of a species: a mutational meltdown.”
“Typical human activity is more devastating to biodiversity and abundance of local flora and fauna than the worst nuclear power plant disaster,” dourly observe radioecologists Robert Baker, of Texas Tech University, and Ronald Chesser, of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, in another study. Baker and Chesser have documented mutations in the cells of voles in Chernobyl’s hot zone. Other research on Chernobyl’s voles reveals that, like its swallows, the life-spans of these rodents are also shorter than those of the same species elsewhere. However, they seem to compensate by sexually maturing and bearing offspring earlier, so their population hasn’t declined.
If so, nature may be speeding up selection, upping the chances that somewhere in the new generation of young voles will be individuals with increased tolerance to radiation. In other words, mutations—but stronger ones, evolved to a stressed, changing environment.
Disarmed by the unexpected beauty of Chernobyl’s irradiated lands, humans have even tried to encourage nature’s hopeful bravado by reintroducing a legendary beast not seen in these parts for centuries: bison, brought from Belarus’s Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the relic European forest it shares with Poland’s Bialowieza Puszcza. So far, they’re grazing peacefully, even nibbling the bitter namesake wormwood—
Whether their genes will survive the radioactive challenge will only be known after many generations. There may be more challenges: A new sarcophagus to enclose the old, useless one, isn’t guaranteed to last, either.
