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mrbluze writes:
"Rachel Nuwer from the Smithsonian Mag gives a good summary around a paper entitled "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas" (Oecologia, March 2014):
In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight.
... the Chernobyl area is at risk of fire, and 27 years' worth of leaf litter, (researcher) Mousseau and his colleagues think, would likely make a good fuel source for such a forest fire. This poses a more worrying problem than just environmental destruction: Fires can potentially redistribute radioactive contaminants to places outside of the exclusion zone, Mousseau says. 'There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years.'
A forest fire burning radioactive plant debris could be catastrophic. The Fukushima disaster is likely to have the same problems locally, but it poses additional risks because radioactive water continues to flow into the sea at an alarming rate, which will likely affect oceanic bacterial levels in a similar way."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by iwoloschin on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:09PM
I spent two summers in high school interning at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. We went on a lot of tours of various experiments at the lab, and one was a cesium-137 experiment on open forest. Even though the experiment had ended years (decades?) ago, many of the trees were still intact, not rotting, almost as if the fungi/microbes/etc avoided them. This was a small scale experiment, I could walk from one side to the other in under 5 minutes, and I was stunned that there was such a lasting effect.
Here's a link to a short article from one of the researchers: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0610-04.htm [commondreams.org]
And here's a link to Google Maps where you can see a small ring in an otherwise untouched forest...things still refuse to grow there. To my knowledge they aren't doing any landscape work there, it's basically an abandoned site in the middle of the woods.
https://goo.gl/maps/h6qLF [goo.gl]
(Score: 3, Informative) by seandiggity on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:59PM
Read the article, trying to figure out if this is the ring [google.com] you're referring to.
If so, the trees in the center look healthy, not "dead trees standing", but then again I'm not quite sure what to look for.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pjbgravely on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:27PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by iwoloschin on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:54PM
It's been a while since I was there, but I think you are correct. The center was a well that the cesium-137 source was stored in. It was manually raised and lowered depending on experiment needs. Around the well there was a cluster of living trees, likely pines (it's in the middle of the Long Island Pine Barrens), though I don't remember. There was a distinct donut shaped clearing around the whole thing though, full of dead, undecaying trees. Very weird.
Also, yes, that's the ring. The big ring to the west is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was formally the world's most powerful collider. That was another very cool thing to tour. They can't run in the summer (not enough power on LI with all the air conditioning), so they turn it off for maintenance all summer, which meant we got to actually go into the tunnels/detectors and see it all up close.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:07AM
Only formally? So what was the actual biggest collider at that time? And why wasn't it formally accepted as such?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fliptop on Tuesday March 18 2014, @06:40PM
This whole thread is giving me lots of hope for SN, already we have a community who's schooled in diverse fields and can expound on most any subject.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alphatool on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:30PM
It's not the same thing at all. The experiments at BNL investigated the (undisputed) negative effects of very high radiation doses, in the order of several sieverts per day. The area around Chernobyl is typically less than a milli sievert per day, so the experiments at BNL were using radiation that was several orders of magnitude higher.
It's also worth noting that the BNL experiments did not observe any negative effects once the radiation field dropped off to levels similar to the area around Chernobyl, so if anything the BNL experiments actually contradict this research rather than supporting it.