糖心TV

Twenty years after the Chernobyl accident there is still no consensus as to the extent of its impact on the environment. After the accident on 26th April 1986 a 30km exclusion zone was set up around the destroyed reactor. More than 100,000 people were evacuated from the area to protect them from the radioactive contamination. Today the area still remains largely uninhabited. Immediately after the accident the extremely high levels of radiation damaged and even killed pine trees and some wildlife close to the reactor but in the subsequent years scientists in Ukraine and Belarus have observed a dramatic recovery in wildlife populations. Today the area remains contaminated albeit to a lesser degree due to natural decay and biota in 聭the zone聮 experience a chronic exposure from elevated background levels. This talk will discuss recent work undertaken by the author and co-workers to quantify the received radiation dose and study its effect on certain types of aquatic biota. The talk will focus on new methods developed to perform in-situ measurements of chronic exposure in both terrestrial and aquatic environments, studies of the movement and fixation of various radionuclides in terrestrial and riverine environments. The impact of chronic radiation exposure on biota will be discussed.