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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: 4, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:38PM
By the scientific method, you are completely correct - these results have not been duplicated. In many ways, I'm very glad there isn't another nuclear wasteland of this scale to compare it to.
However, you've misunderstood the experiment here. It's not exposing leaf matter to radiation, it's exposing the naturally occurring biological decomposition agents that should have processed the leaf matter to radiation and seeing if they lose efficacy for any reason.
Your assertion that it would be a waste of time and money to take any action based on the evidence thus far observed is scientifically correct; back in the real world it doesn't matter what the root cause of the accumulation of flammable radioactive vegetation is if it's already on fire, which is one spark / carelessly discarded cigarette end / lightning strike away from reality.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wantkitteh on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:45PM
Speak of the devil, see threads below for exactly the kind of scientific duplication we were looking for. Case closed, get the undesirables*AHEM*Russian volunteer labour force in here to clear the place asap.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Alphatool on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:15PM
The experiments at BNL don't really have anything to do with the experiments at Chernobyl. BNL used a massive sealed gamma source to irradiate a forest with huge radiation doses, up to several sieverts per day. This is thousands to millions of times more radiation exposure than in the area around Chernobyl which makes it a very different kind of thing - people can live in contaminated areas near Chernobyl for decades without obvious signs of negative effects, but a person would get acute radiation syndrome and die after a day or two in the BNL experimental area, so it's not surprising that there is a difference for plants too.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday March 19 2014, @10:42AM
That's a good point. My original train of thought was that fungus colonies in both areas had internally accumulated emitting material that had rendered the entire colony incapable of performing it's decomposition function, maybe by partially/completely sterilizing the colony and preventing it from emitting spores on the surface. It's still a valid hypothesis at this point but would rely on the high gamma exposure at BNL and the peak-and-tail direct/indirect exposure in The Zone both causing the same sterilization effect over different time periods and I'm not conversant with the biology of fungus reproduction to a sufficient degree to evaluate that possibility.