30 Photos Of Nature Winning The Battle Against Civilization In The Exclusion Zone Around Chernobyl

The accident at Chernobyl was caused by human error. According to Reuters, facility operators, in violation of safety regulations, had switched off important control systems at the plant’s reactor number four and allowed it to reach unstable, low-power conditions.

A power surge led to a series of blasts, at 1.24 a.m., which blew off the reactor’s heavy steel and concrete lid and sent a cloud of radioactive dust billowing across northern and western Europe, reaching as far as the eastern United States. The cloud of radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe.

The Chernobyl Forum, a group of eight U.N. agencies, and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, have estimated the death toll at only a few thousand as a result of the explosion.

U.N. agencies have said some 4,000 people will die in total because of radiation exposure. 

However, the environmental group Greenpeace puts the eventual death toll far higher than official estimates, with up to 93,000 extra cancer deaths worldwide, while the Chernobyl Union of Ukraine, a non-government body, estimates the present death toll from the disaster at almost 734,000.

The disaster was the object of a cover-up by secretive Soviet authorities who did not immediately admit to the explosion.

Eventually, a make-shift cover — the ‘Sarcophagus’ — was built, in the six months after the explosion. It covers the stricken reactor to protect the environment from radiation for at least 30 years. This has now developed cracks, triggering an international effort to fund a new encasement. Radioactive nuclear fuel is still being removed from the plant today.

But how have plants and animals survived and flourished despite the high levels of radiation? It is true, radiation does have real, harmful effects on flora and fauna, and may shorten the lives of individual plants and animals. But if life-sustaining resources are in abundant enough supply and burdens are not fatal, then life will flourish.

According to Science Alert, the burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now "essentially one of Europe's largest nature preserves, the ecosystem supports more life than before, even if each individual cycle of that life lasts a little less."

"In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were. In driving ourselves away from the area, we have created space for nature to return."