A complete core meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 – which forced Soviet officials to encase the failed nuclear reactor in a giant coffin of concrete and metal – killed about 30 people in its immediate aftermath. Scientists now estimate the death toll to be between a conservative 4,000 and a stomach-churning 16,000 additional radiation-related deaths. To reduce this bloodshed, about 1,081 square miles (2,800 square kilometers) of what is now Ukraine and another 838 square miles (2,170 square km) of nearby Belarus were suddenly cordoned off into a radioecological preserve that, despite the setting, is thriving.
Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth, who has studied this “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” (CEZ) for more than 30 years, told The Guardian last week that wildlife has recovered in this radioactive wasteland, even though it is beset by war.
According to Smith, “The wolf population is seven times greater than before the accident because there is less human pressure,” adding that elk, roe, deer and rabbit populations have also increased in the area.
“The ecosystem in the exclusion zone is much better than it was before the accident,” Smith said. “It’s a very powerful demonstration of the relative impact of the world’s worst nuclear accident, which is not that big, and the impact of human habitation, which is devastating.”
Chernobyl’s new breed of wolves
Evolutionary biologists at Princeton discovered something unique about this gray wolf population that likely helped these predators carve out their new niche in the exclusion zone: mutations that appear to make Chernobyl’s wolves more resistant to cancer.
The researchers cataloged the genetic divergence between Chernobyl’s gray wolves and their peers through RNA obtained through blood samples taken from wolves and related populations in Belarus and Yellowstone National Park.
The team, led by evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, tested the CEZ wolves’ exonic genes against human cancer data from the Cancer Genome Atlas, focusing on ten types of tumors recorded in both dogs and humans. Their analysis, presented at the 2024 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, found 23 genes that were unusually prominent in Chernobyl wolves that were associated with two or more of these tumor types. They also found evidence of neutrophil and macrophage immune cell activity, a known adaptive response to cancer.
“A wolf within the Chernobyl exclusion zone,” as Campbell-Staten told NPR at the time, “it may have to deal with the pressure of cancer, but it doesn’t have to deal with the pressure of hunting.”
“And it may be that freedom from that hunting pressure—isolation from humans—will prove to be a much better thing than dealing with cancer, which is kind of messy.”
conflict zone
Beyond the area’s painful new role as a theater of war, with Russian drones damaging the nuclear plant’s new sarcophagus last year, the CEZ has also become a site of conflict among ecological researchers.
Not all species in the region have fared well over the past four decades. Research in Turkey last year found that small birds, including barn swallows and great tits, are struggling to reproduce there due to “sperm abnormalities, oxidative stress and low antioxidant levels”. Like the bank vole, Chernobyl’s rodents have also shown evidence of radiation damage – even larger, more charismatic megafauna have prospered.
Smith in Portsmouth argues that some long-abandoned land near the exclusion zone in Ukraine may, in fact, be ready for human agriculture with the right guardrails, including external gamma dose rate surveys and extensive mapping.
But, as he wrote in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity last September, such changes would require “respect for the dignity and integrity of affected stakeholders and fair distribution of benefits,” which would be a potentially tall order in the case of an armed invasion.
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