At www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/10/6/wildlife-thriving-in-chernobyl.html … the Chernobyl exclusion zone straddles both sides of the border between Belorussia and the Ukraine. An article in Current Biology seems to show that environmentalists have been telling us porkies once again – and low level radiation is not as dangerous as they make out. This story keeps popping up on the net but it never seems to make it into mainstream media – which says a lot about the latter.
The exclusion zone was set up because of fears promoted by environmentalists that the area around Chernobyl had become unsuitable habitat for life as we know it – but nobody told the wildlife. The problem appears to be the difference between levels of radiation – how big a dose you are confronted with. Politicos, fearful of getting the blame if birth defects broke out, were easily frightened by Big Green propaganda – and fell for it. Presumably this is why their allies in the media are loathe to admit they got it wrong – and low levels of radiation are not as injurious as assumed.
Once again, the doom mongering is aired in a frenetic and emotional manner and all the politicos become big girls blouses. They will never learn they are being played, like an angler playing a trout in the river Test on a sunny afternoon. When you think about it somebody should have said hold on, wait a minute, we have radiation every time we go to a dentist and have an x-ray, and cancer is treated with radium (radiation). If radiation is able to heal, in one situation, is it always harmful in the other? This is extremely interesting from a Catastrophist point of view as bursts of radiation must have rained upon the atmosphere during events in the historical past. Even cosmic rays must be harmful if we took the environmentalists seriously. The comments that follow the blog post are interesting and some research would seem to be long overdue.