chernobyl

1300 Words3 Pages

4300 square miles of ground in the now Ukrainian landscape is fenced off from all human activity due to a single event almost 28 years ago: the meltdown and destruction of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor. In effect, a huge amount of radiation was released over a very large portion of western USSR. Thousands of residents were evacuated in the days and moths that followed because of the fear of radiated Fallout now covering the Bread Basket of the Soviet Union. With no human habitation in this One Thousand square mile nuclear fallout exclusion zone, how has the environment been able to survive, cope and live in constant radiation? How does it recuperate? In April 1986, The Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor melted down and virtually exploded releasing a huge quantity of radiation, covering the western region of the Soviet Union in nuclear fallout. The Soviet Government immediately had to evacuate the civilians in the now contaminated areas around Chernobyl. The entire city of Pripyat numbering about 45000 people were evacuated and relocated the very next day after the explosion. “By 14 May, some 116,000 people that had been living within a 30-kilometre radius had been evacuated and later relocated” (World Nuclear Association). All in all, numbers into the millions were affected by the Chernobyl reactor explosion, whether it was direct contact with high doses of radiation as one of the 1000 firefighters who were first on the scene to the children of men who worked and lived in the city of Pripyat. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of people evacuated never see their homes again and unknowingly leaving the wasteland to return to its natural state. The Soviet Union Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor was running a scheduled routine shutd... ... middle of paper ... ...life within the zone everywhere has been thriving. Wolves have returned giving the ecosystem the right balance, and the many animals that contribute to the regrowth or rebirth of the wilderness around the now dead city and nuclear power plant, Prypiat and the old Soviet Union nuclear reactor: Chernobyl. What many human beings all around the world see as a nuclear wasteland, Animals who live in the Exclusion Zone might actually find it like paradise. Since nineteen eighty-six, humans have been absent in this place, and in the very short time the wilderness has taken back the city of Prypiat and the Nuclear Plant just a few miles away. Minimal and no mutations at all gives you the largest packed area in the world with such a biodiversity of animals that the human nuclear wasteland is become an animal sanctuary: even protected by one of man’s worst fear… Radiation.

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