Chernobyl is not a radioactive nightmare like it may seem

After 30 years of a nuclear catastrophe, radioactive contamination in the zone doesn’t seem so straightforward.

“I spent half of my life here,” said Gennady Laptev. The broad-shouldered Ukrainian scientist sadlysmiles, standing next to the empty cooling tank of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

“I was only 25 years old when I started working here as a liquidator. Now I am almost 60,”he added.

Thousands of liquidators who took part in a large-scale and dangerous clearing operation after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 visited the exclusion zone. It was the worst nuclear disaster in history, BBC reports. The cooling station tankdried out when the pumps that took water from the nearby river were finally turned off in 2014. This happened 14 years after when the three survived reactors stopped the operation.

The dust analysis for testing radioactive contamination is only a small part of the pollution study in the exclusion zone, which has been going on for several decades. The Chernobyl accident turned the area into a huge contaminated laboratory, where hundreds of scientists are trying to figure out how the recovery process of the environment goes after the nuclear disaster. Press reminds us of how the explosion occurred at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986. Laptev, who works for the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute started working in the exclusion zone three months after the Chernobyl and Pripyat inhabitants were evacuated.

“We used to fly on a helicopter from Kiev every day to collect water and soil samples. At that moment it was important to understand the scale of the infection in order to map out the exclusion zone,”he explained.

Today, the zone is between Ukraine and Belarus, occupying an area of ​​about 4 thousand square kilometers. This is twice as big as London. The entire population within 30 kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was evacuated. All the settlements around the zone are abandoned. It was officially reported that no one is allowed to get back to live here. Nevertheless, people started moving back to their native villages a few months after the disaster without telling anybody.

Unlike the 30-kilometer zone, there are no checkpoints around the half-abandoned areas. More than 2.5 thousand people live in Narodychi. The village is located inside the zone; that’s for your wider understanding. There are strict laws of the officially polluted areas. In particular, you are not allowed to grow and process products on the contaminated land.

Today, this part of Ukraine cannot simply be divided into two categories: the one which is affected and the other which is not. The researchers found out that the consequences of the Chernobyl accident are more complicated than they seemed to be. And the territory is too strange to simply impose prohibitions, like it is in Narodychi. In fact, the fear of radiation actually harms the population of the village more than the radiation itself.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is located less than a kilometer from the dried cooling tank. A large “new sarcophagus” has been covering the fourth reactor since 2016. There are robot cranes under itthat dismantle radioactive debris that have been there for 33 years in a row. Professor Jim Smith from the University of Portsmouth has been studying the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster since 1990. During his next trip to the zone, he showed a dosimeter to the BBC journalists: a device that shows the radiation background of the terrain. Dust atoms of nuclear fuel that hit the environment in 1986 now spontaneously fall apart. They emit rays with a high level of energy. This way the dosimeter detects them.

The indicators that show radiation background inmicrosieverts are understood only in a specific context of relative "radioactivity". For example, the dosimeter shows 1.8 microsieverts per hour while flying from Kiev to Great Britain.

“Currently the indicator shows 0.6 microsieverts. So this is about a third of what we get during a flight,”said Smith.

These words wereextremely surprising, given the fact that he said this less than a kilometer from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But the British scientist explained that humanity actually lives on a radioactive planet. The natural radiation surrounds us all the time.

“It comes from the sun rays, from the food we eat, from the Earth itself,” Smith explained.

That is why when we are 12 kilometers high to the sky in a plane, a smaller layer of the planet’s atmosphere protects us. And the level of exposure is higher.

“Yes, the exclusion zone is infected. But if we put it on a global map of radioactivity, it will only be a “hot spot” with a slight increase. The natural radiation is all around us. It varies in different countries and different places. Many areas of the exclusion zone have a lower rate of radiation than some places of natural radioactivity in the world,”added the British scientist.

Although the exclusion zone borders have not changed, its landscape is no longer recognized. Nature is dominating over the place where people used to live. Wildlife now covers the abandoned buildings, farms, and the postapocalyptic spirit hangs over the local villages. Smith and his colleagues spend days in the Chernobyl zone collecting samples and placing cameras and audio equipment, which silently collects information about wild animals that now live there. Scientists are trying to figure out how radiation affects them.

BBC journalists and scientists went to the Red Forest, which was spoiled by radiation more than 30 years ago. The radiation background here is 30-60 times higher than in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself.

“We shouldn't be here for a long time,” said Smith. He and his colleagues rapidlygrasped samples of the soil, took a few pictures and got back in the car.

The pressreports that thousands of cases of thyroid cancer, which were cured with varying success are somehowconnected with radioactive contamination after the Chernobyl disaster. However,people think that the effects of Chernobyl can also cause other forms of cancer. Nevertheless, the research has notyet provided a clear answer to this question.

While assessing the long-term effects of the disaster in 2006the World Health Organization concluded that it affected the mental health of many people. In particular, the experts explained that the appearance of various diseases and deviations emerged due to fear of radiation, and because of the disturbance of the usual lifestyle.

As a scientist who has been studying contamination of the exclusion zone for so many years, Gennady Laptev admits that he did not expect that people of Narodychi village would be afraid of radiation.

“This is a big factor that affects their lives even 30 years after the accident. I was very surprised about this”he said.

Fear of exposure hurts both physically and mentally. The feeling of doom and hopelessness among the inhabitants of the zone is closely related to their extremely high level of alcohol addiction and smoking. These two strongly harmsperson’s health.

“What happened here is terrible. But it still depresses the lives of locals. Even though it will be very difficult, but we must move towards a condition when people can return to life without being afraid of radiation,”said Laptev.