Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/

by foxtacles • 3 years ago

241 159 3 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

jmkni• 3 years ago

Fascinating but needs a '2014' marker, I wonder what the situation is nearly another decade on?

sampo• 3 years ago

https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/russian-troops-dug-trenches-in...

sapiogram• 3 years ago

The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said it has been unable to independently verify reporting that suggested Russian forces have received “high doses of radiation.”

All you need to know from the article.

pvaldes4• 3 years ago

If this shows something crystal clear is that if the litter is let alone it doesn't burn necessarily. Just accumulates and made deep soil. The only wildfires in Chernobyl since 2014 were those provoked by soldiers. No men messing around + no cattle or farmers = no big wildfires.

Of course we want this litter to remain just where it is as many decades as we can, but under each rock there is always an idiot, so the healing process is never guaranteed.

sva_• 3 years ago

The only wildfires in Chernobyl since 2014 were those provoked by soldiers

Not exactly true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_...

pvaldes4• 3 years ago

Thanks for the update. This proves my theory

"At least one suspect was arrested for alleged arson".
"the local young man has confessed to starting fires for fun"

Ok. Lets change "soldiers" by a more generic "human pieces of s*t".

I wonder if any fossil were radioactive before to became a fossil. That would made the process much easier.

EB-Barrington• 3 years ago

I was living in Kyiv during the last Chernobyl fires (2020) - they were BIG.

There have been others - it's a very dry place in summer.

wongarsu• 3 years ago

It's also worth noting that Ukraine gets 5-10 days of rain per month year around (or snow or other precipitation), and the driest month is comparable with San Francisco's October in terms of total precipitation.

No humans messing around plays a big role, but everything being wet most of the time certainly helps.

dendrite9• 3 years ago

It seems the forest conditions/fuel load are very different in Ukraine from places like California, the Rockies, or Turkey. Lightning starts wildfires completely free of human intervention.

bequanna2• 3 years ago

Apples and oranges. I believe this area in Ukraine is considerably wetter vs. many Western US forests that typically see large scale wildfires.

pvaldes4• 3 years ago

All forests in the planet follow basically the same rule. The more time left undisturbed, the more water will fix in the area. Top ecosystems in the chain have typically plenty of water. Lower forms have less and less water and are more unstable.

"There are huge wildfires because no water in the area".

This is a lie that we tell ourselves. There is not water in the area because wildfires. Many of this fires were deliberated crimes and would have burn with or without water. The lack of water is a scar of a previous attack.

Somebody should build a forest Matrioska with a tiny cow cranium in the inner figure. Maybe this way the people would finally understand the obvious rule. After a few thousand years untouched, all forests became "rainforests".

garganzol2• 3 years ago

Radiation has a notable sterilizing effect - this is why the speed of a natural decomposition is diminished. Fewer microbes leads to a slower decomposition.

whoopdedo• 3 years ago

It's probably a good thing that the exclusion zone hasn't become a breeding ground for mutant radiation-resistant bacteria.

meschi• 3 years ago

I was wondering why that would be a bad idea and how much radiation sterilization is used today. Apparently about 40-50% of medical single use products are sterilized beforehand using radiation.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/goronzy2/

rtkwe3• 3 years ago

Most of the exclusion zone is pretty low levels of radiation so I'm not sure how effective those are other than that they're an elevated background level. The FDA says <2 kGy delays sprouting of vegatables and fruit aging 1-10 kGy decreases the levels of bacteria and >10 kGy is used for actual sterilization. Most of the zone is <1 Sv/h so you need 10k hours or more to get above the 10 kGy used for sterilization.

https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview....

thrashh• 3 years ago

But that to me just says that radiation definitely delays growth and a little radiation already affects a much larger organism like a plant, it’s probably hurting smaller organisms much more.

Beldin• 3 years ago

There are 365×24 = 8760 hours in a year. So after 1 year and 52 days, we've crossed this threshold - at current levels.

So: thoroughly sterilised, if the FDA isn't totally off.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

The average US background radiation dose ranges from 1.5-3.5mSv/yr, or 0.25-0.6uSv/hr. This guy went into the exclusion zone and took various measurements [1] and outside of hotspots, the radiation level there seems to be just at or above the average US background radiation level.

Now I'm sure if you go digging in the Red Forest like the Russians did at the start of the war you're going to have a bad time, but the exclusion zone has settled down significantly. Most of the highly radioactive isotopes have by definition a very short half-life.

Are you confident there are fewer microbes?

[1] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...

hammock• 3 years ago

He took surface measurements. Is the same true below the surface? Bugs and microbes live deep in the soil

FredPret• 3 years ago

...oh boy

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Now could this be solution for large scale carbon capture? Seed massive amounts of forested areas with radioactive material? So we could prevent large mass of bio material from decomposing and thus releasing carbondioxide?

anonporridge• 3 years ago

There's a scifi or apocolyptic story in here.

Environmental extremists come to the conclusion that irradiating large patches of Earth to make it unlivable for humans but is a net benefit to the non human ecosystem because the damage from human habitation far exceeds the damage from radiation. And of course, life evolves and adapts to the radiation. Then they start seeding dirty bombs to intentionally create more and more of these no go zones that become nature sanctuaries.

I suppose "The 100" is partially playing into this concept.

bluGill• 3 years ago

No, because water in all dead material will dry out and then lightening strikes will start a fire and turn it all into CO2 again.

If you want to make a difference make sure that you start a forest and grassland fire every single year - the regular fires ensure the resulting fires are small and leave a lot of carbon behind some of which will get incorporated into the forest floor and forever stored away. Plus forests depend on those fires to clean up all the under brush.

Note, the above applies to most forests in North America, but you need to check with a local expert in forests to understand the details and where it doesn't apply. Every location/climate has different forests with different needs. There is no blanket statement that is right for everything.

hinkley• 3 years ago

Sealife sanctuaries are causing commercial fish populations to bounce back. We just need rules that are simple enough that animals understand them, and we can fix a whole shitload of problems.

1970-01-012• 3 years ago

Just deforest the land and dump the logs onto the North/South Pole, reforest, and repeat. No radiation necessary.

NotYourLawyer• 3 years ago

“Just” move a zillion tons of wood halfway across the earth.

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

I have read a similar proposal that you can just drop biomass into deep oceanic trenches. The cold, pressure, etc mean that decomposition is significantly slower than would happen on the surface.

klyrs• 3 years ago

Poe's law strikes again; I came here to make the same comment sarcastically.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I keep looking at the word "properly" and thinking that is implying some negative judgment. I'm all for using radiation to preserve food from decay — as we do already, and should do more of. But I suppose it may be considered proper to preserve food meant for storage, transfer, and human consumption, while considering leaves in the woods not decaying to be improper.

jonplackett• 3 years ago

Weirdly, there was actually a period of history where this was normal.

During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

dekhn4• 3 years ago

That didn't sound too right for me (but my biology knowledge is dated at this point) so I read the relevant section from that page. It concludes wiht:

"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""

It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.

Timon3• 3 years ago

And grass is even younger - just ~100-65mya! (depending on the source - not sure if it's narrowed down in papers)

digging3• 3 years ago

In general, it's mind-blowing to travel back in Earth's history and realize there were tens or hundreds of millions of years where strategies that are commonplace today had never been tried before (or they'd tried too early and failed). It makes one wonder, what will be the strategies of future life which no creature has yet evolved? Can we even imagine it?

greggsy• 3 years ago

Presumably flowers proliferated due to insect pollinators?

est31• 3 years ago

Yeah the snippet of the wikipedia page that you link is citing the paper that put the final blow to the fungal lignin breakdown hypothesis. It points out (the last point is particularly strong):

* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then

* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.

* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.

(copying my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654837 )

Konohamaru• 3 years ago

This is good news. The idea of the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis was this:

"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."

Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.

causality0• 3 years ago

You know it would be very cool if someone made an UE5 demo that was just a forest with a dozen or so options to change the date and see which types of vegetation appear and disappear.

jackmott42• 3 years ago

And when that huge pile of trees finally started to burn, we got our first case of rapid global warming from burned carbon. The second one is done by humans right now.

pfdietz2• 3 years ago

Actually, burning of trees helped reduce CO2 over the long term. That's because burning is incomplete and produces charcoal. Charcoal doesn't decay, so when it is buried it semi-permanently takes carbon out of the biosphere. Over extended time, this would draw down atmospheric CO2. Some coal deposits from that period have a significant fraction of charcoal in them.

fallingfrog4• 3 years ago

This doesn’t sound right. Iirc there have been many periods in earth’s history warmer than today, and carbon was part of the climate feedback for all of them, but this is the first time that warming is coming from direct forcing via co2.

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

Did they make big fallen tree piles? What a time that could have been for any species interested in burrows, bushwhacking, or forts.

godelski17• 3 years ago

My brain loves to pretend that this is what happened for millions of years, but the truth is that it turns into dust and "dirt." Things still weather and get broken. Even stone turns to sand. But it takes longer than we're currently used to and the particles don't get processed. But this same event that the parent linked led to all our coal as well as an important niche that modern fungi hold today (they existed back then, but couldn't process the lignin. Interesting thing, there's a term called "evolutionary radiation" and this was one of the largest periods of time for this, but it is not related to the radiation in the context of Chernobyl.

BeFlatXIII• 3 years ago

Isn't that the major origin of coal deposits?

londons_explore• 3 years ago

Presumably the exclusion zone shrinks a bit each year as previously unsafe areas become safe to live again?

ftxbro• 3 years ago

"Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly"

i hope they can decay so their spirits can finally be laid to rest. the last thing ukraine needs right now is to be flanked by some restless undead radioactive ents

franky47• 3 years ago

Wagner and the Radioactive Ents would be a cool band name.

tomohawk• 3 years ago

The Russian takeover of the zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has pushed it to the edge of another catastrophe.

lamontcg• 3 years ago

And they may create another catastrophe in order to try to halt the current Ukrainian offensive.

throwaway742• 3 years ago

Didn't they safely shut it down?

aorloff• 3 years ago

It still needs to be staffed to continue shutting down

thepostman0• 3 years ago

My house is full of woodworm and Chernobyl is welcome to take the timbers.

godelski17• 3 years ago

including some [wild boar] bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation.

This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiation limits, not to hit a level where you're at risk. This also doesn't include that you'll heal over that period. The problem here is that if you're eating this much pork every day you're going to be at far higher health risks for heart disease than radiation sickness. Recommended is not more than 50g/day or 0.05kg/0.11lbs. For reference, Germans eat about 55kg of meat a year, so you'd be eating 220x the average German if you had a craving for the most radioactive boar and ate it exclusively. Germans used to eat more meat, and especially pork, and these stories have just done wild damage to the population. Especially because farm pigs aren't affected. But a side benefit is that less Germans are dying of heart disease, so I guess that's nice.

As for the forest, you may notice if you google it you'll see this story limited to 2014 and maybe a BBC article from 2019 as a result of the HBO series. [0] You may be interested to know that wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl and this is almost an accidental nature preserve. Life is shorter, yes, but life is flourishing and wildlife populations are far higher now than they were prior to the disaster. Population levels are similar to uncontaminated regions. It is really a fascinating area to understand from a biological perspective (same with Fukushima, which has similar results). When you dig into these they really challenge your preconceived notions of radiation damage. There is danger, don't get me wrong, and I don't think people should go inhabit these places just yet. But neither are these places dying. They're more like the post-apocalyptic movie scenes where animals and plants take over. There's far more nuance and interesting things happening in these regions and I wish we'd discuss these from a more holistic perspective.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190701-why-plants-survi...

maxbond5• 3 years ago

That might be an argument humans aren't endangered by contaminated boar, but is not an argument that the ecosystem isn't threatened. Presumably predators and scavengers are eating a significant amount of boar and other contaminated meat relative to their body weight.

godelski17• 3 years ago

If you read the second paragraph, this is addressed. If you follow the links in the BBC article you'll find data on the wildlife. The only thing abnormal about population sizes in the area is that there are a larger number of wolves than compared to non-contaminated regions. But we also need to consider that due to the size of this area, that it in essence is akin to the largest nature preserve and has far fewer human visitors. Probably important to remember that humans are a big reason for the decrease in wolf populations in most regions.

Fwiw, I did mention that the animal lives are possibly lower quality and definitely shorter lived. So I'm not quite sure what you're rebutting from my comment. It appears that you're just rephrasing part of it but without any source and clear suppositions from a misunderstanding of the data in the first paragraph I wrote.

beders• 3 years ago

Oh, a nature reserve... Never mind the 200,000 people that had to be relocated...

It doesn't matter how we perceive as nature coping with this disaster. The fact that it shouldn't have happened, the fact that there are still other reactors in operation of the same type, the fact that billions of tax payer dollars went into preventing more severe consequences should be a warning sign that this madness we call nuclear power needs to stop.

What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.

godelski17• 3 years ago

Never mind the 200,000 people that had to be relocated...

This is definitely a traumatic event. I'm not going to downplay this or the harm done at Fukushima. But I also don't think it is helpful to exaggerate the damage. The context of the discussion here was about nature and wildlife, so that's what I talked about. If you want to bring people into the conversation then I think that's a different matter. The cost of disruption to people's lives is large, both economic, mentally, and physically. But we also need to be clear that these costs are not because of radiation. It is important because we have these same costs when it comes to matters like oil spills, ground water contamination, and other such events that are far more common but do not receive yearly articles on (despite these events happening yearly).

What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.

This is not a good faith argument here and not actually accurate. If you would like to engage in good faith I'm more than happy to. But if you want to just vocalize your non-expertise opinions and berate anyone who doesn't agree, then that's not a conversation, that's a hostage situation and violates HN rules.

taneq• 3 years ago

How many bananas is that?

godelski17• 3 years ago

548 bananas per day

dEnigma3• 3 years ago

you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median.

You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness (since you mention that afterwards)? I'm pretty sure people are more concerned with increased cancer risk than that. Not saying that this is a valid concern here either, just that radiation sickness is on the far end of a spectrum of dangers.

godelski17• 3 years ago

You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness?

No, to hit EU dosage limits (20mSv). Which still is below actual risk of cancer. This is a small risk if taken all at once (acute exposure) but not found when protracted. For example, UK workers who consistently got 30-40mSv/yr had no statistical increase of cancer. So the number is 0% increase in cancer risk due to radiation exposure.

But again, we're talking about eating an __absurd__ amount of HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE boar you can find (well above thresholds), DAILY, and for an entire year. Do you know what 3lbs of pork looks like? The volume is 9 x 5 x 4 inches and is 24 servings. You're eating that daily, and it is the most radioactive boar you can find. It is not only an absurd amount of food, but also unrealistic to even source with high levels of effort (*most* radioactive, not average).

But here's the thing, consuming that meat DOES result in a multiple percent increase in risk of getting cancer. The problem is that this is due to eating red meat and the risk would be the same if you were sourcing non-radioactive boar. You're focusing on the wrong thing if you're concerned about your health and safety.

What part of "eating 3lbs of pork a day is going to cause your heart to explode" is not being understood here? You're clearly not the only one that is missing this. I'm not sure how I'm being unclear.

_ph_• 3 years ago

I just had an exchange with a local hunter who claims that 60% of the shot boars are discarded and deposited for being over the radiation limits for food. If you feel happy eating them, please contact some Bavarian hunters to get some cheap meat.

hef198986• 3 years ago

That sounds about right. Some reagions just a few kilometers north of where I live are fine, close by hunter ask to be paid to hunt boar, otherwise it is just not economically viable due to test and recycling requirements.

godelski17• 3 years ago

I need to clarify, the calculations I used are based on 2,857 Bq/kg. The threshold for Germany is 600 Bq/kg. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that the German government sets high levels of safety. Japan put limits as 100 Bq/kg. The limits don't change the danger levels.

Here's a study you may be interested in[0]

The minimum and maximum radiocesium concentrations were 87.1 Bq/kg FM and 8,120 Bq/kg FM, respectively, with a median concentration of 450 Bq/kg
If the residents consume the wild boar meat as a meat source once, the median committed effective dose was in the range of 0.062 to 0.30 μSv/day, with a maximum value of 5.4 μSv/day. In Japan, the natural effective dose from food ingestion was estimated to be 99 µSv/y, which was 0.27 µSv/day
The committed effective dose for one-time ingestion of wild boar meat could be considered extremely low for residents in Tomioka.

You can use this information to calculate risk. Let's combine based on these numbers instead of mine. EU dosage limit = 20mSv/yr. We'll subtract 2.1mSv for average German dosage[1], leaving us 17.9. Taking the higher dosage from this study (13.5x German thresholds) giving us 3314.8 "meat sources" to reach the limit (defined at the bottom by median pork consumption, maximum ~50g/day). Let's then say they eat 3 servings per meal, eat 3 meals a day, and do so for an entire year. Their dosage will be 19.84mSv/yr (17.739 from the 8,120 Bq/kg boar). Your relative increase in lifetime chance of cancer at 20mSv protracted radiation exposure is approximately 0%. It is approximately 0% even at 40mSv protracted. Your risk of getting cancer due to eating that much meat is well above 0, since a single source here is roughly 50g (the recommended limit for daily consumption of red meat) and you're eating 9x that (450g/day). Your risk of cardiovascular issues are even higher.

Were I to live in Germany, I'd appreciate the cheap pork.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7283223/

[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/natural-radiati...

sparsely• 3 years ago

It's a good point that the radioactive fallout is less bad (in some ways) for certain concepts of nature than sharing the space with modern people.

Sophistifunk• 3 years ago

Pripyat seems like an excellent place to look for genes and organisms that will help us grow food (and recycle air) on the moon / mars.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

The Red Forest is highly contaminated, such that surface level microroentgens per hour are at least 10X than what's considered maximum safe level for humans, and likely a good deal higher in the soil.

There are other tests that could have been done, such as measuring the ability of soil suspensions taken from the Red Forest to breakdown cellulose in a test tube (studies that would probably require a lot of care in a radiation-safe lab), but the kind of study described in the article (leaving bags of leaves around to see what happens to them) seems to be enough to prove the point; fungal/insect breakdown of plant matter is inhibited in the most severely contaminated areas of the exclusion zone.

Looking around, here's a study on the contamination of fish in surrounding lakes (still an issue). Some fish are more genetically sensitive to it than others, but you probably wouldn't want to eat any of them:

"Impact of Environmental Radiation on the Health and Reproductive Status of Fish from Chernobyl" (2018)

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b02378

aeternum• 3 years ago

I wonder if any studies have looked at potential positives. For example the Red Forest is applying a selection pressure towards radiation-hardened Fungi, insects, and even potentially wildlife. This seems pretty important given the ongoing risk of nuclear war.

User23• 3 years ago

Does this mean that a full blown nuclear reset could create conditions that would allow coal to form again?

dang• 3 years ago

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404345 - March 2014 (121 comments)

pkphilip• 3 years ago

So you are telling me that I may be able to slow down aging if I receive a huge dose of radiation from time to time? /Just-kidding

wkat4242• 3 years ago

And still people going on saying Chernobyl only caused a handful of human deaths.. That's not the only problem with nuclear disasters.

DoreenMichele• 3 years ago

I think it would be reasonable to assume the accident killed a lot of stuff at the time and one factor is it's not being reintroduced in part because it is a zone of exclusion.

They should experiment with bringing in decay promoters to try to prevent a devastating fire from making things worse. (Assuming they haven't done so already, which may be wrong given the age of the article.)

toss1• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, Russia is sub-threatening to make an even better "test example" using the the Ukranian Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant which they currently occupy, saying "no threat for now" [0].

They just blew a major dam in Kakhovka, Ukraine, with tens of thousands being evacuated.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-no-threat-f...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/live-updates-ukraine-accuses-russia-of...

Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)

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