That didn't sound too right for me (but my biology knowledge is dated at this point) so I read the relevant section from that page. It concludes wiht:
"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""
It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.
And when that huge pile of trees finally started to burn, we got our first case of rapid global warming from burned carbon. The second one is done by humans right now.
> including some [wild boar] bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation.
This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiation limits, not to hit a level where you're at risk. This also doesn't include that you'll heal over that period. The problem here is that if you're eating this much pork every day you're going to be at far higher health risks for heart disease than radiation sickness. Recommended is not more than 50g/day or 0.05kg/0.11lbs. For reference, Germans eat about 55kg of meat a year, so you'd be eating 220x the average German if you had a craving for the most radioactive boar and ate it exclusively. Germans used to eat more meat, and especially pork, and these stories have just done wild damage to the population. Especially because farm pigs aren't affected. But a side benefit is that less Germans are dying of heart disease, so I guess that's nice.
As for the forest, you may notice if you google it you'll see this story limited to 2014 and maybe a BBC article from 2019 as a result of the HBO series. [0] You may be interested to know that wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl and this is almost an accidental nature preserve. Life is shorter, yes, but life is flourishing and wildlife populations are far higher now than they were prior to the disaster. Population levels are similar to uncontaminated regions. It is really a fascinating area to understand from a biological perspective (same with Fukushima, which has similar results). When you dig into these they really challenge your preconceived notions of radiation damage. There is danger, don't get me wrong, and I don't think people should go inhabit these places just yet. But neither are these places dying. They're more like the post-apocalyptic movie scenes where animals and plants take over. There's far more nuance and interesting things happening in these regions and I wish we'd discuss these from a more holistic perspective.
That might be an argument humans aren't endangered by contaminated boar, but is not an argument that the ecosystem isn't threatened. Presumably predators and scavengers are eating a significant amount of boar and other contaminated meat relative to their body weight.
I just had an exchange with a local hunter who claims that 60% of the shot boars are discarded and deposited for being over the radiation limits for food. If you feel happy eating them, please contact some Bavarian hunters to get some cheap meat.
> you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median.
You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness (since you mention that afterwards)? I'm pretty sure people are more concerned with increased cancer risk than that. Not saying that this is a valid concern here either, just that radiation sickness is on the far end of a spectrum of dangers.
Oh, a nature reserve...
Never mind the 200,000 people that had to be relocated...
It doesn't matter how we perceive as nature coping with this disaster.
The fact that it shouldn't have happened, the fact that there are still other reactors in operation of the same type, the fact that billions of tax payer dollars went into preventing more severe consequences should be a warning sign that this madness we call nuclear power needs to stop.
What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
Radiation has a notable sterilizing effect - this is why the speed of a natural decomposition is diminished. Fewer microbes leads to a slower decomposition.
The average US background radiation dose ranges from 1.5-3.5mSv/yr, or 0.25-0.6uSv/hr. This guy went into the exclusion zone and took various measurements [1] and outside of hotspots, the radiation level there seems to be just at or above the average US background radiation level.
Now I'm sure if you go digging in the Red Forest like the Russians did at the start of the war you're going to have a bad time, but the exclusion zone has settled down significantly. Most of the highly radioactive isotopes have by definition a very short half-life.
Most of the exclusion zone is pretty low levels of radiation so I'm not sure how effective those are other than that they're an elevated background level. The FDA says <2 kGy delays sprouting of vegatables and fruit aging 1-10 kGy decreases the levels of bacteria and >10 kGy is used for actual sterilization. Most of the zone is <1 Sv/h so you need 10k hours or more to get above the 10 kGy used for sterilization.
Now could this be solution for large scale carbon capture? Seed massive amounts of forested areas with radioactive material? So we could prevent large mass of bio material from decomposing and thus releasing carbondioxide?
Environmental extremists come to the conclusion that irradiating large patches of Earth to make it unlivable for humans but is a net benefit to the non human ecosystem because the damage from human habitation far exceeds the damage from radiation. And of course, life evolves and adapts to the radiation. Then they start seeding dirty bombs to intentionally create more and more of these no go zones that become nature sanctuaries.
I suppose "The 100" is partially playing into this concept.
No, because water in all dead material will dry out and then lightening strikes will start a fire and turn it all into CO2 again.
If you want to make a difference make sure that you start a forest and grassland fire every single year - the regular fires ensure the resulting fires are small and leave a lot of carbon behind some of which will get incorporated into the forest floor and forever stored away. Plus forests depend on those fires to clean up all the under brush.
Note, the above applies to most forests in North America, but you need to check with a local expert in forests to understand the details and where it doesn't apply. Every location/climate has different forests with different needs. There is no blanket statement that is right for everything.
Sealife sanctuaries are causing commercial fish populations to bounce back. We just need rules that are simple enough that animals understand them, and we can fix a whole shitload of problems.
If this shows something crystal clear is that if the litter is let alone it doesn't burn necessarily. Just accumulates and made deep soil. The only wildfires in Chernobyl since 2014 were those provoked by soldiers. No men messing around + no cattle or farmers = no big wildfires.
Of course we want this litter to remain just where it is as many decades as we can, but under each rock there is always an idiot, so the healing process is never guaranteed.
It's also worth noting that Ukraine gets 5-10 days of rain per month year around (or snow or other precipitation), and the driest month is comparable with San Francisco's October in terms of total precipitation.
No humans messing around plays a big role, but everything being wet most of the time certainly helps.
It seems the forest conditions/fuel load are very different in Ukraine from places like California, the Rockies, or Turkey. Lightning starts wildfires completely free of human intervention.
The Red Forest is highly contaminated, such that surface level microroentgens per hour are at least 10X than what's considered maximum safe level for humans, and likely a good deal higher in the soil.
There are other tests that could have been done, such as measuring the ability of soil suspensions taken from the Red Forest to breakdown cellulose in a test tube (studies that would probably require a lot of care in a radiation-safe lab), but the kind of study described in the article (leaving bags of leaves around to see what happens to them) seems to be enough to prove the point; fungal/insect breakdown of plant matter is inhibited in the most severely contaminated areas of the exclusion zone.
Looking around, here's a study on the contamination of fish in surrounding lakes (still an issue). Some fish are more genetically sensitive to it than others, but you probably wouldn't want to eat any of them:
"Impact of Environmental Radiation on the Health and Reproductive Status of Fish from Chernobyl" (2018)
I wonder if any studies have looked at potential positives. For example the Red Forest is applying a selection pressure towards radiation-hardened Fungi, insects, and even potentially wildlife. This seems pretty important given the ongoing risk of nuclear war.
I keep looking at the word "properly" and thinking that is implying some negative judgment. I'm all for using radiation to preserve food from decay — as we do already, and should do more of. But I suppose it may be considered proper to preserve food meant for storage, transfer, and human consumption, while considering leaves in the woods not decaying to be improper.
Unfortunately, Russia is sub-threatening to make an even better "test example" using the the Ukranian Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant which they currently occupy, saying "no threat for now" [0].
They just blew a major dam in Kakhovka, Ukraine, with tens of thousands being evacuated.
I think it would be reasonable to assume the accident killed a lot of stuff at the time and one factor is it's not being reintroduced in part because it is a zone of exclusion.
They should experiment with bringing in decay promoters to try to prevent a devastating fire from making things worse. (Assuming they haven't done so already, which may be wrong given the age of the article.)
> "Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly"
i hope they can decay so their spirits can finally be laid to rest. the last thing ukraine needs right now is to be flanked by some restless undead radioactive ents
jonplackett|2 years ago
During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
dekhn|2 years ago
"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""
It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.
themodelplumber|2 years ago
BeFlatXIII|2 years ago
jackmott42|2 years ago
godelski|2 years ago
This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiation limits, not to hit a level where you're at risk. This also doesn't include that you'll heal over that period. The problem here is that if you're eating this much pork every day you're going to be at far higher health risks for heart disease than radiation sickness. Recommended is not more than 50g/day or 0.05kg/0.11lbs. For reference, Germans eat about 55kg of meat a year, so you'd be eating 220x the average German if you had a craving for the most radioactive boar and ate it exclusively. Germans used to eat more meat, and especially pork, and these stories have just done wild damage to the population. Especially because farm pigs aren't affected. But a side benefit is that less Germans are dying of heart disease, so I guess that's nice.
As for the forest, you may notice if you google it you'll see this story limited to 2014 and maybe a BBC article from 2019 as a result of the HBO series. [0] You may be interested to know that wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl and this is almost an accidental nature preserve. Life is shorter, yes, but life is flourishing and wildlife populations are far higher now than they were prior to the disaster. Population levels are similar to uncontaminated regions. It is really a fascinating area to understand from a biological perspective (same with Fukushima, which has similar results). When you dig into these they really challenge your preconceived notions of radiation damage. There is danger, don't get me wrong, and I don't think people should go inhabit these places just yet. But neither are these places dying. They're more like the post-apocalyptic movie scenes where animals and plants take over. There's far more nuance and interesting things happening in these regions and I wish we'd discuss these from a more holistic perspective.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190701-why-plants-survi...
maxbond|2 years ago
_ph_|2 years ago
dEnigma|2 years ago
You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness (since you mention that afterwards)? I'm pretty sure people are more concerned with increased cancer risk than that. Not saying that this is a valid concern here either, just that radiation sickness is on the far end of a spectrum of dangers.
sparsely|2 years ago
taneq|2 years ago
beders|2 years ago
It doesn't matter how we perceive as nature coping with this disaster. The fact that it shouldn't have happened, the fact that there are still other reactors in operation of the same type, the fact that billions of tax payer dollars went into preventing more severe consequences should be a warning sign that this madness we call nuclear power needs to stop.
What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
garganzol|2 years ago
arcticbull|2 years ago
Now I'm sure if you go digging in the Red Forest like the Russians did at the start of the war you're going to have a bad time, but the exclusion zone has settled down significantly. Most of the highly radioactive isotopes have by definition a very short half-life.
Are you confident there are fewer microbes?
[1] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...
rtkwe|2 years ago
https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview....
whoopdedo|2 years ago
Ekaros|2 years ago
anonporridge|2 years ago
Environmental extremists come to the conclusion that irradiating large patches of Earth to make it unlivable for humans but is a net benefit to the non human ecosystem because the damage from human habitation far exceeds the damage from radiation. And of course, life evolves and adapts to the radiation. Then they start seeding dirty bombs to intentionally create more and more of these no go zones that become nature sanctuaries.
I suppose "The 100" is partially playing into this concept.
bluGill|2 years ago
If you want to make a difference make sure that you start a forest and grassland fire every single year - the regular fires ensure the resulting fires are small and leave a lot of carbon behind some of which will get incorporated into the forest floor and forever stored away. Plus forests depend on those fires to clean up all the under brush.
Note, the above applies to most forests in North America, but you need to check with a local expert in forests to understand the details and where it doesn't apply. Every location/climate has different forests with different needs. There is no blanket statement that is right for everything.
hinkley|2 years ago
klyrs|2 years ago
1970-01-01|2 years ago
jmkni|2 years ago
sampo|2 years ago
dang|2 years ago
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404345 - March 2014 (121 comments)
pvaldes|2 years ago
Of course we want this litter to remain just where it is as many decades as we can, but under each rock there is always an idiot, so the healing process is never guaranteed.
wongarsu|2 years ago
No humans messing around plays a big role, but everything being wet most of the time certainly helps.
dendrite9|2 years ago
sva_|2 years ago
Not exactly true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_...
bequanna|2 years ago
EB-Barrington|2 years ago
There have been others - it's a very dry place in summer.
photochemsyn|2 years ago
There are other tests that could have been done, such as measuring the ability of soil suspensions taken from the Red Forest to breakdown cellulose in a test tube (studies that would probably require a lot of care in a radiation-safe lab), but the kind of study described in the article (leaving bags of leaves around to see what happens to them) seems to be enough to prove the point; fungal/insect breakdown of plant matter is inhibited in the most severely contaminated areas of the exclusion zone.
Looking around, here's a study on the contamination of fish in surrounding lakes (still an issue). Some fish are more genetically sensitive to it than others, but you probably wouldn't want to eat any of them:
"Impact of Environmental Radiation on the Health and Reproductive Status of Fish from Chernobyl" (2018)
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b02378
aeternum|2 years ago
karaterobot|2 years ago
Sophistifunk|2 years ago
pkphilip|2 years ago
toss1|2 years ago
They just blew a major dam in Kakhovka, Ukraine, with tens of thousands being evacuated.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-no-threat-f...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/live-updates-ukraine-accuses-russia-of...
DoreenMichele|2 years ago
They should experiment with bringing in decay promoters to try to prevent a devastating fire from making things worse. (Assuming they haven't done so already, which may be wrong given the age of the article.)
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
User23|2 years ago
thepostman0|2 years ago
tomohawk|2 years ago
lamontcg|2 years ago
throwaway742|2 years ago
londons_explore|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
ftxbro|2 years ago
i hope they can decay so their spirits can finally be laid to rest. the last thing ukraine needs right now is to be flanked by some restless undead radioactive ents
franky47|2 years ago
wkat4242|2 years ago
aaron695|2 years ago
[deleted]
FredPret|2 years ago