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Fukushima: Wild boars take over Japan's evacuated towns [video]
- mpweiher 10y agoAs with most nuclear accidents so far, the health risks from fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks from the radiation itself. The boars don't know about the radiation and therefore do not fear it.
- masklinn 10y agoWith respect to wildlife, it's more that the health risks of radiation are significantly lower than the health risks of human presence and activities.
- jlebrech 10y agothe average pig in captivity only lives for around 6 months, so them dieing at 1 or 3 gives them plenty of time to procreate.
- sonthonax 10y agoWild animals have a death rate orders of magnitude greater than healthy Japanese people. The increased incidence of radiation sickness probably does little to the overall death rate of the boars.
- sageikosa 10y agoIn those cases it's usually better to check out fecundity rather than life expectancy deltas. Has live birth rate declined or infant mortality increased?
- lubonay 10y agoGo hang out at Pripyat if you really think it's the fear that gets you. I volunteer as the B group, fearing radiation intensely but staying away from it. We can document whose health deteriorates first!
- mpweiher 10y ago"Expert Assessment Consensus The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date" -- Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident, page 95, World Health Organization [1] But what do they know? [1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_eng.pdf?ua=1 http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_...
- Retric 10y agoThat's with a large scale evacuation, so it says nothing about living in the area. It's like saying Y2K did not cause any major issues so all that effort was pointless. Remember, dealing with probelms alters the outcomes so you can't look at the outcome alone.
- morsch 10y agoExactly, the cited passage goes on: The magnitude and scope of the disaster, the size of the affected population, and the long-term consequences make it, by far, the worst industrial disaster on record. Chernobyl unleashed a complex web of events and long-term difficulties, such as massive relocation, loss of economic stability, and long-term threatds to health in current and, possibly, future generations, that resulted in an increased sense of anomie and diminished sense of physical and emotional balance.
- vidarh 10y agoYou'll note that a large proportion of these are due to the evacuation, and we do not know how much of that was necessary. In terms of directly attributable health effects, including deaths, it's nowhere near the worst industrial disaster on record. It's a curious claim. We'll likely never know whether that was due to the evacuation or simply that the risk were overstated. E.g. consider the Bhopal disaster [1] for comparison - 2259 official immediate deaths in Bhopal vs. 56, and nearly 4000 confirmed dead due to the disaster and 16k+ estimated total deaths, vs. a WHO estimate of 4000 eventual shortened lifespans after Chernobyl (e.g. people whose life expectancy over a period of decades is shortened due to increased cancer risks). Bhopal further caused an estimated 558,000 injuries. For comparison, the Chernobyl exclusion zone used to be home to 120,000 people. Far more people were actually harmed in Bhopal than even lived near Chernobyl. Chernobyl is only worse than Bhopal on a single measure: It will take longer before the area is fully safe to use again (but much shorter than people initially thought - as mentioned elsewhere, there is already pressure to open it up to more activity, as background radiation is already down to relatively safe levels). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
- _ph_ 10y agoSorry, no. There is a distinctive health risk to radioactive radiation, and thus the regions around Fukushima and Chernobyl are evacuated from permanent residency. It is perfectly safe to do short trips into those regions. But long term, this is a considerable health risk. The boars can live there, because they are short-lived animals compared to humans, and the article doesn't say whether they do reach their natural life span even. They only seem to live long enough to procreate, which is 1-3 years for wild boars. Humans could live there as well, but they would experience an unacceptably short live. A human group can survive on a life expectancy of little more than 20 years, thats what human kind did in the past. But by modern standards this is not acceptable, and consequently those regions are not considered safe for settlement.
- ckastner 10y ago> Humans could live there as well, but they would experience an unacceptably short live Is this an assumption on your part, or can you back this up with data?
- _ph_ 10y agoI am not a MD, but I think it is accepted knowledge that elevated radiation levels shorten the life expectancy. How much, depends on many factors, like the exact nature of the radiation, like you are exposed to it, or have a likelyhood of eating contaminated foo, and of course your very age. The older you are, the less likely you are to suffer from this. I haven't done research on this myself, but I would assume that the exclusion zones have been set up according to the accepted standards for radiation safety levels.
- coddingtonbear 10y agoI'd recommend doing a little research about the controversy around the "Linear no-threshold model" of radiation exposure. The answer isn't quite as clear as you might guess.
- mpweiher 10y agoHere is an article explaining.[1] It's a "random site on the Internet", so feel free to not believe anything they say, but I think they provide fairly good references to source material. There was also a documentary film a while ago, I'll see if I can find it. It mentions this apartment complex in Taiwan that was contaminated, and the health of the residents turned out to be better than average, not worse. Ahh, found it[2]. Seem like fairly reputable sources. [1] http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/nuclear.html http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/nuclear.html [2] http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-Cobalt-taiw-06.pdf http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-Cob...
- maxerickson 10y agoYou are conflating impact and controllable individual risk. If there was no exclusion zone at all the impact from fear would likely still be larger. That measurement wouldn't help the people getting large radiation exposures inside the zone.
- emodendroket 10y agoBut nobody really cares if boars get cancer and die early, unlike humans.
- jlebrech 10y agomost pigs die early, but from humans.
- emodendroket 10y agoYeah, all the more reason why comparing humans' unwillingness to live in high radiation areas with that of boars is kind of a silly comparison to make.
- pvaldes 10y agoMost interesting question about boars is that they are big animals that dig deep in the soil searching for roots, rodents and tubercles. They are basically working hard to return the buried radioactive isotopes to the surface again when they are more dangerous. We should think on it and adjust our models to predict and understand the problem. And Boars will travel in and out of Fukushima of course.
- pvaldes 10y agowhen they are more dangerous -> where (the isotopes) are more dangerous
- ctack 10y agoDNA damage from radiation could potentially affect future generations of boars.
- kristianov 10y agoWhat's scarier than wild boars are radioactive wild boars.
- _ph_ 10y agoYou meant it as a funny statement, but it is actually true. Here in Bavaria, we actually have too many wild boars in the forests, but hunting them for meat is limited by the fact that they are still partially contaminated by the radiation left from the Chernobyl disaster. So about 1 out of 3 animals shot have to be destroyed.
- vermontdevil 10y agoSame if you hunt near Oak Ridge. I recall seeing signs there that ask you to bring hunted deer for radioactivity checkups. Found this blog about statistics from that area: http://knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/2008/11/27/checking_out_hot_deer_in_oak_r/ http://knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/2008/11/27/checking_out_hot_...
- zeristor 10y agoI think the bigger issue here is why have these radio nuclides escaped into the environment? Has there been an incident, a fire? Have these been dumped, or leaked into the water? Surely this shouldn't be happening.
- vidarh 10y agoOak Ridge held the uranium separation facility for the Manhattan project, and also held materials storage, at a time when standards were rather more lax.
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- rb1 10y agoTurns out, living in an environment with as low as possible background radiation might not be such a great idea either. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/09/23/is-radiation-necessary-for-life/#2ba1b4bd7898 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/09/23/is-radiat... <~~ forbes piece about this study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2015.1062571?journalCode=irab20 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2015.106...
- alphonsegaston 10y agoI've never seen addressed how one factors in long-term societal problems into the use of nuclear energy. There's not a country in world that hasn't experienced a civil war, invasion, or other massively destabilizing event within the span of time needed to safely manage nuclear energy and its byproducts. After Chernobyl, I always wondered how a less authoritarian regime would respond to a similar nuclear disaster. Now that we have Fukushima, we can see the Japanese government doing something like a combination of climate change denial and media manipulation (Japanese television frequently runs pieces conflating opposition to nuclear energy with a lack of empathy for those who suffered in 3/11). It would probably work the same in the states.
- 77pt77 10y ago> Japanese television frequently runs pieces conflating opposition to nuclear energy with a lack of empathy for those who suffered in 3/11 Can you elaborate? I don't get it.
- tinco 10y agoI think they meant 'support' not opposition.
- alphonsegaston 10y agoSure. It's kind of hard to understand without being a regular consumer of Japanese television like the NHK. But essentially, they run a lot of segments and short documentary pieces focused on the plight of residents evacuated from the area, focused on how they just want to go back home/return to normalcy(entirely understandable). This is then framed against the backdrop of people concerned with the safety of returning to the region or "exaggerating" scientists blocking their return or creating the social context in which they're being mistreated. Only rarely is it addressed that this situation was created by a mixture of government corruption and willfull negligence. Or that the problem is still entirely unresolved and many other Japanese reactors are at risk for similar catastrophic events.
- petre 10y agoSo would you rather they burn coal, which they don't have and has to be imported and intoxicate everyone with mercury and arsenic biproducts from coal burning? These two heavy metals also contaminte seafood, which the Japanese are quite fond of.
- rodionos 10y agoThere was a report on Chernobyl the other day. Apparently, the nature there is experiencing a renaissance of sorts with a measurable growth both in biodiversity as well as in the sheer number of species, including endangered ones. For animal world, the radiation is the lesser of two evils, the first one being humans. Here's a BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/russian/science/2015/02/150205_ukraine_chernobyl_wild_animals http://www.bbc.com/russian/science/2015/02/150205_ukraine_ch... It's in Russian, but the pictures are telling if you can't read it.
- eriknstr 10y agoAre those wild horses? If so then that's awesome. Also, Lynx are great, happy to see them too.
- rimantas 10y agoIn case you will be able to see this comment: these are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_horse
- rimliu 10y agoThose are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_horse brought there in the nineties.
- Arizhel 10y agoThe radiation levels near Chernobyl probably aren't that bad anyway; if you lived there, you could probably expect to die of cancer 2-3 decades earlier than normal, I'm guessing. So expect to die at 40-55 maybe. For modern humans, that doesn't sound all that appealing, so we stay away. But animals don't live that long in the wild typically anyway, and tend to reproduce fairly quickly. So dying of cancer in middle-age probably isn't all that noticeable to them, because they're probably going to die by then anyway, or either accident or predation or (non-radiation-related) disease.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
- MrFantastic 10y agoDo you want orks? Because that's how we get orcs.
- n00b101 10y agoOr Bebop [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop_and_Rocksteady https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop_and_Rocksteady
- mholmes680 10y agoIsn't this just nature trying her best to redistribute the radiation threat? Or does radiation not work that way?
- andygates 10y agoThat's remarkably goal-orientated for a bunch of competing randomness. No, it's just that wildlife doesn't care about moderate contamination, doesn't especially care about stillbirths and birth defects, won't sue and can't be kept out.
- mholmes680 10y agoI was only being half-flippant - maybe there's a better way to leverage this situation. Alas, tho, I don't have one.
- btreecat 10y agoCan we name one Bebop?
- arippberger 10y agoThey're gonna end up with some real-life Princess Mononoke demon boars.
- jlebrech 10y agoMaybe we should relocate endangered species to Fukushima or Chernobyl. Noone's going to buy a radioactive tusk.
- maxerickson 10y agoI think lots of people would buy radioactive tusk, often because they wouldn't even know it was radioactive.
- Sunset 10y agoThey would deserve it.
- jlebrech 10y agoand the rumours will do the rest of the work.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt won't be all that radioactive so there won't really be rumors.
- oftenwrong 10y agoWhy is this interesting? Wild boars in Japan are common in areas where there are few people because they are generally scared of people. If you come across one in the forest, most likely it will run away from you.
- Lasher 10y agoAren't radioactive wild boars (or rats) the first enemy you encounter on pretty much every post apocalyptic video game ever? Funny how things turn out...
- marze 10y agoDid anyone see a measurement on just how radioactive the boars are?