Posted on 04/24/2026 8:55:43 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Once the epicenter of a catastrophic nuclear disaster, Chernobyl in Ukraine was left uninhabitable for humans. But in the silence that followed evacuation, nature began to reclaim the land.
Przewalski's horses, once nearly extinct, now roam freely, grazing among overgrown buildings as forests reclaim old roads.
Wolves, lynx, moose, and red deer have also returned, along with free-roaming dogs and even brown bears, a species absent from the region for more than a century.
Still, the recovery is not without complications. Radiation remains an invisible presence, and scientists continue to observe its subtle but lasting effects, such as birds developing cataracts and frogs evolving darker skin.
New threats have also emerged. Military activity in recent years has damaged parts of the zone, while forest fires risk releasing radioactive particles back into the air.
"Most forest fires are caused by downed drones," Oleksandr Polischuk, who leads a firefighting unit in the zone, told PBS News. "Sometimes we have to travel dozens of kilometers to reach them."
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
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“Are they radioactive?”
Well the boars are. Mr. GG2’s SIL is from France. He says if you kill a wild boar in Europe it has to be tested for radiation.
Gives the lie to the “weakness” of LIFE writ large on this earth, which the unspoken theme of environmentalists and climate alarmists alike.
I just looked it up, yes even Italy and Germany have to test!
I remember when scientists said nothing would grow in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for 97 years.
The next year the flowers came up and bloomed, trees grew new shoots and budded out.
That doesn't mean the boars are radioactive.
They test as radioactive because they've eaten plant material contaminated with cesium-135 and/or cesium-137. What's testing as radioactive is the cesium within them, not the flesh of the hogs. And most of that contamination (estimates are as high as 68%) is cesium-135 that was fall-out from Cold War weapons testing, not the Chernobyl accident.
Animal tissue can become radioactive but if it does -- strictly speaking -- it won't remain living for very long, because it takes several times more than a lethal dose to make it so. So inside of days or weeks of having been made radioactive, it would cease to be living.
This gets distorted a lot because people mistakenly believe that radioactivity is contagious, and it is not. You can't be made radioactive simply by contact with something that's already radioactive. There's more detailed information here but, in a nutshell, to "become irradiated," non-radioactive material has to absorb A VAST NUMBER of neutrons emitted by a decaying radioactive isotope.
The VAST NUMBER bit is important in this case because the only way to get that intense a dose is from a sustained nuclear reaction, and the two most likely sources for that are nuclear reactors or nuclear bombs.
So for those boars themselves well and truly to have been radioactive, they would have had to have been at Chernobyl on that day 40 years ago, and been exposed to the reactor itself, not merely the fall-out. And then they would have had to survive 40 years after receiving a several times lethal dose of radiation.
Strictly speaking, not possible.
Radiation remains an invisible presence,
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False.
By now, the radiation there, except for few spots, decayed to very acceptable levels.
People are as susceptible to radiation as animals, but are continuously fed this unscientific and unsubstantiated scare of radiation.
I have read all kinds of stuff about that area, some of which I’m sure at least sounded like pure fiction. When might we read the whole truth about it? Hard to think there must not have been some immense radiation there.
No it doesn’t mean the boars are radiated but since boars don’t know about borders well.....
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