Environment
Radiation surveys suggest it is finally safe to grow food on farmland in Ukraine that has been unused since the 1989 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. But will it happen,
LARGE areas of farmland around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that are officially classed as contaminated now appear to be safe to use for growing food. Surveys show radiation levels have fallen below the levels regarded as unsafe according to Ukrainian regulations.
Changing the status of this land could help compensate for farmland lost as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“More than 80 per cent of [surveyed] territory can be returned to agricultural production,” says Valery Kashparov at the National University of Life and Environmental Science of Ukraine, whose team has been assessing the radioactivity of the land for more than a decade.
Evacuations and bans
In 1986, one of four reactors at the nuclear power plant near Chernobyl – or Chornobyl in Ukrainian – went into meltdown during a test, causing an explosion and fire that released radioactive isotopes of elements including iodine, caesium, strontium and plutonium into the atmosphere. The most highly contaminated land was evacuated and farming was banned across a larger area.
The large quantities of iodine-131 released were the biggest health threat. However, this isotope has a half-life of just eight days, so it declined to negligible levels within years.
Other isotopes, such as caesium-137 and strontium-90, have a half-life of around 30 years, so while levels have more than halved, they remain present in the soil around the region.
In the main exclusion zone closest to the nuclear plant, which may become a nature reserve, levels are still high in many places. But further out, on land that is still officially classified as radioactively contaminated, they have fallen below the threshold regarded as dangerous.
The most recent survey was carried out in 2023 by Volodymyr Illienko, also at the National University of Life and Environmental Science. He and his colleagues measured radioactivity levels on 2600 hectares around the settlements of Narodychi and Vyazivka. “We didn’t find a higher level than permissible,” Illienko told New Scientist.
Altogether, about 130,000 hectares of farmland outside the exclusion zone is classified as radioactively contaminated but could be brought back into use if wider surveys find they are safe, says Illienko.
In places, some fields or parts of fields do exceed the limits, says Jim Smith at the University of Portsmouth, UK. However, in yet-to-be-published work done in conjunction with Kashparov, he has shown that little of this radiation is transferred to crops.
If farming is officially allowed to resume, this should be confirmed by testing food directly as well, says Smi
