Plants Near Chernobyl Adapt To Contaminated Soil 293
lbalbalba writes "In April 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded and sent radioactive particles flying through the air, infiltrating the surrounding soil. Despite the colossal disaster, some plants in the area seem to have adapted well, flourishing in the contaminated soil."
Re:Hmmm that'll do... (Score:2, Informative)
Depends on the type and strength of radiation present. If it's mostly alpha particles then it will be blocked by your skin, but they can still penetrate mucous membranes (like in the nose and around the eyes) or be inhaled and absorbed through the lungs.
There is also the inverse square law, standing several feet away from a lightly radioactive source is going to be less hazardous than handling it with your bare hands. Hence the gloves.
Darwin +1 Creationism +0 (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, evolution can be really fast (Score:2, Informative)
Under the right circumstances, evolution can be quite fast. The geological history of the earth shows many massive die-offs followed by a tremendous flowering of new life forms. If there is an ecological niche available, something will adapt/evolve to fill it.
Naturally, simpler life forms evolve faster than complex ones. Germs evolve in months. Humans evolve in tens of millennia. Plants are somewhere between the two.
Re:BBC, wtf? (Score:3, Informative)
This is how the BBC reports online - single sentence 'paragraphs' under headings that are closer to where you'd really divide paragraphs. I'm not sure why you're so outraged, news reports in general use short paragraphs and fragments. The NY Times, for example, frequently uses single sentence paragraphs.
It makes articles easier to skim and ensures a consistent style between journalists, I'm not sure what your issue with it is.
You are mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
Read their method.
They first observe that plants start to spontaneously grow again in contamination sites despite the high radioactivity. Then they brought in seeds from uncontaminated origin. One batch goes to the contamination site, and another batch (the controlled group) goes to a decontaminated area near the site. Seeds grow fine in both batches, showing that seeds from uncontaminated origin is able to survive the radioactivity in the very first generation. The study is about the mechanism how plants naturally resist radioactivity. No evolution is taking place here.
Re:Darwin +1 Creationism +0 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmm that'll do... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmm that'll do... (Score:4, Informative)
Radiation isn't the only problem. Uranium is toxic even without its radioactivity. I suspect that there are a bunch of other byproducts of a reactor explosion that are just as bad.
Re:Hmmm that'll do... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they would do something.
Primarily they would prevent the accidental ingestion of alpha particle emitters. Shit like polonium like the Russians used on that reporter a few years ago. They're normally harmless, your dead skin cells will stop the alpha particles, but [deity] help you if you ingest them.
The background radiation levels are easily measurable and it's pretty easy to calculate how long someone should reasonable stay in an area unprotected. I would wager that these scientists actually know something about science, and were mainly concerned with ingesting alpha emitters, not absorbing gamma rays.
Re:Yep, evolution can be really fast (Score:3, Informative)
Better let the polar bears know, because it only took them 5-10k years to adapt. That's pretty quick in geologic time.
Re:You are mistaken (Score:1, Informative)
Also, how bad can the radioactivity be if they can be in there with home depot face masks and some thin gloves? Certainly not enough to do any immediate damage to plants...
Re:Cool, but old news. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention a nifty "myth busted" moment for that old Hollywood trope of a post-nuclear wasteland.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear one, it was steam (due to a massive reactor power spike thanks to the skillful removal of pretty much all possible safety procedures in an already sub-optimal reactor design) that blew open the core and scattered radioactive material over the landscape and into the atmosphere thanks to the lack of a containment vessel. The Hollywood trope of the post-nuclear landscape typically involves the detonation of several hundred megatons of nuclear bombs and, as near as we can tell, is pretty accurate; Chernobyl isn't really comparable to a nuke in either the degree of the explosion or in the amount of radioactive fallout. /nitpick
Re:And this is stunning because.... (Score:2, Informative)
Did all the plants die off after Chernobyl?
In some areas, yes. See Red Forest [wikipedia.org]. But that doesn't stop plants and animals from making their way back in, however slowly. Sounds like an extreme environment ripe for adaptation/evolution.
Re:Wasn't this predicted (Score:3, Informative)
Not really.
The predictions used to involve everything bigger than rats keeling over and nothing but the most hardy stuff surviving in the contaminated areas.
They've gradually changed to reflect reality and the nature of radioactive decay.
Feel free to forget that though and pretend you always expected exactly what happened.
As it turned out an area contaminated by radation appears to be far more hospitable to wildlife than an area heavily populated by humans.
And humans do live in the exclusion zone.
Not many but some do.
Re:The kids aren't all right. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The kids aren't all right. (Score:3, Informative)
All nature sounds eerily silent to people accustomed to the noise of city living. There is no hum of engines or transformers, no sirens, no screeching tires, no TV or radio. It is shocking like plunging into cold water when you step out of your car and into an environment where noise is the exception rather than the rule. At first, it sounds dead. As you begin to grow accustomed to it, however, you start hearing wind in the trees or grass, birds, etc. It sounds "desolate" because the sounds are different in volume and frequency, not because everything is dead. Moles, deer, and wolves don't make a lot of noise. There's a reason people that go way out into the bush for a long time sometimes come back and don't talk much. Silence is natural.
I'll grant you that the containment doesn't seem promising. Plants regularly grow in radiation zones, though, afaik; they're usually a lot more radiation-tolerant than we are. Gingko trees survived at Hiroshima (still growing today; http://www.xs4all.nl/~kwanten/hiroshima.htm [xs4all.nl] ), lichens are hard to affect with radiation, etc.
Totally agreed on Thorium (liquid salt) reactors. I don't like having our nuclear power technology stuck in the 60's.