Chernobyl: inside the exclusion zone

at the fair every ride is a ghost train now the loudest voices in Pripyat are the cuckoos in the physics classroom time is out of the equation this was a showcase nuclear city for elite scientists and engineers now all that's left is a vision of what the world might look like if all the people suddenly disappeared it's it's just two miles from the Chernobyl reactor complex but in your people your work who did Nene really be that Seabus yesterday all right on April 26 1986 it blew up and caught fire the unlucky few who dealt with the worst of the cleanup died from radiation sickness everyone else in the vicinity was evacuated to escape the worst of the fallout there remains a 1000 square mile exclusion zone all around the plant but while it may now be one of the loneliest places on earth it's far from empty there can't be a more powerful symbol of the risks of radiation and the city of Pripyat 50,000 people used to live here but come back nearly 30 years after they were all evacuated and what strikes you is that it's an equally powerful symbol of our influence over nature because if you take humans out of the equation the wild light surges back despite the contamination we're here to go on a fallout field trip into one of the most radioactive areas of the zone 30 years on there's no need for gloves and masks but the boiler suits prevent us carrying contaminated dust and soil home ecologist Mike wood leads the project so this is the village of Berea Kafka and it's a village that sits right on the western trace and the western trace that part of the plume of that all out that came from the initial explosion of the park yeah that's the narrow plume and off to the west and at this particular location the level of contamination was searched that some of the buildings were deliberately demolished and they started cleanup activities their guide is a Ukrainian scientist who knows more about the wildlife here than perhaps anyone else he pioneered the use of camera traps to study ecology in this Forbidden Zone but before they switch on the equipment the three decades worth of reading to get on with there's a popular conception that radioactive fallout from Chernobyl somehow devastated the natural environment here but when you come to the zone you realize that's anything but the case and what these scientists are trying to figure out is just how wildlife manages with that radioactivity and also to study its return to what you used to be a human environment and take a look at what they found over the last year their camera traps have caught the return of European bison as heavy as a car and absent for centuries wolves never seen here before the accident that have slowly migrated in from neighboring Belarus wild Przewalski's horses are thriving along with wild boar and Europe's largest cat the Lynx and then last winter an incredible discovery a brown bear the first ever recorded in eastern Ukraine do you say this looks like a healthier ecosystem than areas outside the zone in Ukraine absolutely absolutely much more healthy because for since for wildlife more important absence of people absence of their activity but they need more evidence they're putting camera traps in areas of the zone that received varying levels of Fallout and they're not just looking but listening what we've got here is a wildlife acoustic recorder okay so this is going to capture the soundscape at the area that we're in that's going to capture the noises from the invertebrates the flies that are buzzing around it'll capture the sound of the birds singing it will capture noises of large mammals that are coming through this area right and it will give us a a picture a sound picture of the biodiversity is present within the area it's much-needed research some previous studies claim to have found serious impacts of radioactivity but so far this team's work has found little effect outside the most contaminated areas the studies are quite confused as to whether or not that's the case so actually our study here in Ginobili it's about to understand more about the way in which the atoms in Chernobyl are faring if that's showing no real significant change at a population level then perhaps we then need to start rethinking our assessment of exactly what level could be described as safe and even in highly contaminated animals there's scientific debate about what the harmful effects of radiation really are I'm standing now above the cooling ponds of the old reactors take a look at these fish these wells catfish have grown up to 8 feet long they've been described as radioactive mutants and it's true studies have shown damage to their DNA from radioactive mud in which they feed but by every other measure they are healthy and numerous the truth is that is big because they're like bred from visitors and no one is allowed to catch them it makes it hard now to imagine the disaster in this reactor released 400 times the amount of radioactivity as the hiroshima bomb this long after the disaster most areas of the exclusion zone aren't actually that radioactive anymore but because of the way they fallout fell immediately after the explosion some areas are still really very radioactive this is about 1,500 times normal background radiation it's not harmful in small doses but you would want to spend too long here at all but it's all relative the radiation dose we received during our entire trip to the zone was similar to what you get from a single transatlantic flight maria chef cata has as much respect for radiation as she does for the authorities she tells us how she sent them packing more than once ordered to leave in 1986 she came back a year later to live in the house in which she was born she's 87 tomorrow you are inevitable that juice to zero this coconut Priscilla yeah you could not you Tilly tell you what Rita you ready although yeah it really Bradley taquoia Boulevard Ely Pajaro do general Bradley the levels they found weren't high and this is the garden she's fed herself from everyday her only real complaint is the lack of rain and the potato beetles eating their way through her spuds thank you very much Maria waves us off and we leave her to get back to one of the quietest lives in the world then it's back along the decaying roads and into the bush to check the camera traps in the thick vegetation of summer we fail to spot any large animals but there most certainly hear a shot from over night of just the sort of animals the team appear to study look at that moment mother and baby moose what a fantastic Shores Chernobyl was a human disaster in every sense it cost lives hundreds of billions of dollars and perpetuated a fear that follows nuclear power to this day but another part of its legacy is now emerging the mess left behind banished humans and gave nature the upper hand this zone is now one of the few places in the world that's getting wilder Tom Clark Channel 4 News in Chernobyl you

Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 191,198

Rating: 4.8432884 out of 5

Keywords: Channel 4 News, 4 News, Channel 4, news, latest news, breaking news, news today, chernobyl, wildlife, animals, channel 4 news, video, radiation, ukraine

Id: khv87k68kIs

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/FumCarts]

You would think she is doing pretty well considering her environment. But she is actually only 38.