By all visual accounts, the area surrounding Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant is a 19-mile haven flush with wildlife and greenery. Scientists note moose, boar, wolf, eagle, and river otter sightings, all signs of a thriving ecosystem. So fecund is the infamous and irradiated land, the Ukrainian government designated it a wildlife sanctuary in 2000. 

But looks can be deceiving. Since the nuclear reactor meltdown in April 1986 and the area’s immediate evacuation, the Zone of Alienation has been essentially devoid of human activity, except for scientists studying nuclear safety and how 22 years of radiation exposure affects animal and plant life.

“Of all the small mammals out there, the voles are getting the highest internal dose,” says biologist Robert Baker, who studies bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) in Chernobyl. “They eat lichens and things that perpetuate the radioactivity, so when they eat it they become ‘screamers’ themselves. That’s our slang for highly radioactive because it makes the Geiger Counter scream.”

While no one disputes the presence of radiation in Zone wildlife, its impact—whether it has genetically altered species and if so, is the change detrimental to the species survival—continues to be a topic of heated debate. Chernobyl is considered the “foremost nuclear catastrophe in human history” by the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which in 2005, along with seven other international agencies, released a Chernobyl Forum report, intended to settle once and for all the disaster’s impact. But in regard to wildlife, the report equivocated over the long term genetic effects.

“Both in the exclusion zone, and beyond, different cytogenetic (chromosomal) anomalies attributable to radiation continue to be reported from experimental studies performed on plants and animals. Whether the observed cytogenetic anomalies in somatic (sex) cells have any detrimental biological significance is not known,” the report concludes.

Behind this ambiguous finding, lie the contradictory study results and animosity between a handful of scientists. Baker and his group at Texas Tech University maintain that they have no definitive results linking genetic changes in bank voles to radiation exposure. Meanwhile, an ongoing study of Chernobyl barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) by two scientists at the University of South Carolina and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, say they’ve found significant effects.

Posted on May 30, 2008 at 10:00 AM
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