Tough!

WELCOME TO CHERNOBYL
by : Claudie Baran, Le Figaro.

At a moment when the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor is extremely worrisome, Figaro Magazine has gone back to Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the greatest nuclear catastrophe of all time. A territory still contaminated, closed-off to man, but where the flora and fauna have proliferated in strange ways. Investigation from a forbidden zone...

April 2011. Chernobyl. A mere 200 meters inside the exclusion zone, the tires of the Skoda grip the bituminous road and stop brutally in the middle of nowhere. All around,
the high grasses ondulate to a vagabond breeze. A cheerful sun but steel cold. A hoard of wild horses feed peacefully: these are mythical Przewalski horses. The herd consists of some ten animals, the females and off-spring somewhat retreating from the dominant male, who, head held high and nostrils open to strange smells, defies whoever would wish to approach. In spite of spring shedding which gives them a striped appearance, one is forced to recognize the insolent state of good health of these animals, a population all the more fragile because the species itself is in danger of extinction. Today, some fifty specimens are allowed in this peaceful haven.

Welcome to the strangest laboratory on the planet where enigma and paradox are everyday, and political stakes and scientific quarrels nourish a deafening debate. Numbers, studies and publications follow one another, the one often invalidating the other carried by the opinions of pro or anti nuclear protagonists.

April 1986. Saturday 26, 1,23 hrs in the morning. Following a security routine, engineers loose control of the Lenin Reactor. The accident leads to the fusion of reactor 4. Two explosions followed by a fire lead to considerable ejection of radioactive matter in the environment as well as the projection of combustible matter debris. The total radioactivity ejected in the atmosphere was of the order of 12 billion billion becquerels
(30 000 times the total emitted by all nuclear reactors in one year) over a period of ten days. The radioactive panache disseminated rare gases, iodine, cesium, strontium and plutonium. 250 000 people were displaced, 135 000 evacuated including the 49 000 inhabitants of Pripyat, a city abandonned in three hours thanks to a thousand buses requisitionned for the occasion; 2 044 square kilometers emptied of all human occupation. Left today are a few yellowed maps on walls disfigured by humidity where the ‘disaster’, as it is called here, comes down to two circles - administrative - drawn with felt pen; the hard kernel with a circumference of 10 kilometers around reactor number 4, the second measure, a 30 kilometer perimeter, defines the forbidden zone.

Nature abhors a vacuum!

All around, Nature has taken over. Everywhere, a fauna and flora as unexpected as insolently prosperous. Moose, wildcats, bears, deer, red deer, wolves have reclaimed the area. The atmosphere...A redstart couple trill on top of a tree while a magpie is heard from lower down. A marten chases a rodent in the reaches of a birch tree. Sensing the presence of a predator, a family of mice disappear in a hole. The marks on a torn tree trunc attest to the presence of deer. Rabbits jump up like mechanical toys as one disturbs their homes. Even as the disaster has metamorphosed the natural environment, wild life seems to mock the impact of ionizing radiation, speedily taking over to the last morsel spaces abandonned by man without visible menace or alteration to slow down this progression.

Yet, there have been profound alterations to natural habitats. Forests have become radioactive reservoirs with 90% of it at ground level. Moss, mushrooms, lichen living in the superficial layers from which they get their nutrients, show heavy concentratio ns of radionucleids. Certain mushrooms reach to one million becquerels (100 000 bcq per kilo=1 000 the allowable levels).Trees have poorly adapted to radiation. Evergreens, more fragile than deciduous trees, are all dead or have mutated, replaced by birch trees. The pioneer species, resistant to everything, has replaced pines, fruit trees, beeches. One might explain this by the different sizes of the genomes: smaller for the birch trees, these might be less vulnerable to radiation.

The more resistant vegetable species have recolonized the impovrished and sterile spaces, redesigning the original forest and taking over the identites of the occupants.

At the Chernobyl firehouse, a few wild animals are exhibited as in a miniature zoo. Frightened, a red fox with a panache tail digs a ditch along te grill. Further off, an enormous boar, his knees caked in mud, slides his impressive groin in an opening of the fence, looking over his captors. A year ago, the dogs trapped in a young wolf. Once severed, he was returned to the wild. Sine then, Viy ( his pet name) often roams around the barracks, attracted by the odors of refuse and chickens.

The wolf: a beautiful specimen with golden fur looks fixedly with slit eyes, nose to the wind, ears on alert. Try to approach and the animal petrifies. The young male sniffs the air with the knowing look of one who knows what it costs to be foolhardy in open territory. Later, one hears it bark before disappearing with the quickness of light. The old people who have come back to the disaffected villages tell that, at night, the hoards unite their voices, pushing their howls to the acute.

A small group of oldsters have come back to Chernobyl.

To reach the dachas where live the group of old people who have resisted expulsion (some fifty in all), one has to cut one’s way through resolutely aggressive vegetation, practically unbreachable in some areas. Deserted villages follow one another. Some are down to the metallic frames of beds, the only material to have resisted in a quarter century. Others disappear under heavy vines clinging in long chains to wooden surfaces. Although the cold is severe, Sava Obrazhai is in shirtsleeves, severely-worn casquette down on his head, his left hand showing a tatoo that had been a hoe and hammer later badly reconverted to a heart and arrow. With great authority, he tells how, after each expulsion, he has come back to live in his home, on his land : «With my wife, we scaled the wall, hid in the forest, and made a large detour to come back here.» Living completely cut-off from society, Sava and Helena wish to die where they were born. There are chickens in cages. A beautiful turkey clucks cheerfully. The whole will be eaten by the proprietors, ignoring the order to forego all contaminated meats.

Griva Victor Andreïevitch is a vetenarian. The man, short-legged, with a reddish complexion, has been working for twelve years in the zone. Twice a year, it is by helicopter that he makes the effort to vaccinate raised animals. It is a strange paradox that these are protected from mad cow disease and respiratory illnesses when they in fact suffer from more serious conditions. Like all inhabitants of the region, he is convinced that animals resist radioacivity much better than humans. The proof : « Here all the women from my village have gynecological malformations, and the majority will never bear children while the stork on top of this electrical post comes back every year, in perfect health. One only has to observe, see how beautiful she is!»

Two hundred and eighty species of birds have been noted in a census of the zone. Here, as elsewhere, the lark marks the arrival of Spring. But these migrating birds, changing environments with the seasons, and who spend no more than a half-year at Chernobyl, suffer from various pathologies and genetic ills. Ornithologists Moller (CNRS université Paris-Sud) and Mousseau (South Carolina U.) have long studied the common lark. They have found tumours in wings, eyes, feet, as well as partial albinism. Among others. A frequently advanced hypothesis is that, variations in levels of radioactivity may be detrimental to life. Are these birds an exception or the rule?

We do know it will take two centuries for the cesium and and strontium to no longer pose a problem. As for the plutonium involved, 240 000 years will be necessary to get rid of all traces of it on the globe. Meanwhile, flora and fauna have created a picture which is the stuff of tourist pamphlets.

«Seize the opportunity to visit Chernobyl, to approach no 4 Reactor, and see Pripyat the ghost town where life stopped in one day! A unique opportunity to relive the greatest technical catastrophe of the 20th Century in an unforgetable day.» Moscovites are takers. Buses bring in 8 000 curious per year, come to walk the empty streets, some in high heels, others with a bottle of vodka. Family members push each other in front of the sarcophagus (where there still sleeps 190 tons of combustible material), as do friends, even mewlyweds on their honeymoon who buy, for less than 100 euros, the big thrill.

A few hundred meters from these obstrusive bipeds, a busy four-legged life leaves underground refuges to nourish itself, at that hour when part of the forest gets ready to eat the other. The sun goes down on Chernobyl. It is imperative to go through the checkpoint before eight o’clock. Before the exclusion zone, emptied of man, becomes a world of animals.