CHERNOBYL TIMBER,
GET YOUR GEIGER COUNTER
Would you want a house built from trees in Chernobyl’s
forest?
Originally published April 23, 2016 at 2:50 pm Updated April 25,
2016 at 7:25 am
Thirty years later, there are signs
of commercial clear-cutting in supposedly off-limits forests around the site of
the nuclear disaster in Ukraine. (BRYAN DENTON/NYT)
Lumber from
Chernobyl, while not exactly glowing in the dark, would pose risks to anybody
living in a house made from it.
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By
The New York Times, (and linked by Florida Forestry Assn. to members)
PRIPYAT, Ukraine —
The road through the forest, abandoned, is at times barely discernible, covered
with the debris of fallen tree limbs, vines, leaves and moss pushing up through
cracks in the crumbling asphalt.
The moss is best
avoided, says the guide, Artur Kalmykov, a young Ukrainian who has made a hobby
of coming to the Exclusion Zone in Pripyat surrounding the nuclear reactor at
Chernobyl, set aside after the catastrophe in 1986. It can be radioactive,
having carried buried radiation to the surface as it grew.
Above all, he says,
watch out for windblown dust, which could be laced with deadly plutonium.
Related
Despite the dangers
and the risk of arrest, Kalmykov feels at home. “In Kiev, my head is full,” he
said. “Here, I can relax. I could hang out in Kiev. But this is more
interesting.”
What Kalmykov and
fellow unofficial explorers of the Chernobyl zone, members of a peculiar
subculture who are in their 20s and call themselves “the stalkers,” have found
is more interesting still: vast tracts of clear-cutting in the ostensibly
protected forest.
Kalmykov, a
computer programmer who discovered the clear-cut areas while exploring the zone
on his weekends, took his findings to Stop Corruption, one of the civil-society
groups that popped up in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution two years ago,
events supposed to usher in a new era of clean government in Ukraine.
And yet on
Ukraine’s dirtiest patch of land, Stop Corruption says, based on the stalkers’
evidence, the under-the-table dealings of the bureaucrats who manage the area
are flourishing.
Distracted by the
upcoming 30th anniversary of the catastrophe Tuesday and the general turmoil in
Ukraine, the group says, the Exclusion Zone Management Agency has turned a
blind eye to the Chernobyl logging.
The Zone of
Alienation, as it is also known, is a rough circle with an 18-mile radius,
fenced off with barbed wire. Access is strictly controlled, so that delegations
and guided tours typically travel a few fixed routes.
Outside those areas
frequented by tourists, Stop Corruption said, under the guise of salvage
logging of trees killed in wildfires, healthy pines are being felled in great
numbers for sale in Ukraine and Romania, from where the timber may be resold
throughout Europe.
“We thought these
incidents were isolated and unimportant, but when we started to investigate, it
turned out the problem was gigantic and systemic,” said Vadim Vnukov, the
group’s head lawyer.
Lumber from
Chernobyl, while not exactly glowing in the dark, would pose risks to anybody
living in a house made from it, Vnukov said.
“There is a clear
health risk here,” he said.
Today, scientists
say, the average radiation level in the zone is about a quarter as harmful to
human health as it was in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and fire. A
typical reading in the zone is about 100 microsieverts, or comparable to the
exposure that an airplane passenger might receive on a trans-Atlantic flight.
But harmful risks
lurk. Placed near the moss, for example, a Geiger counter hummed like an
electric shaver.
“It’s not as
dangerous as it seems,” Kalmykov said with a shrug. “Some people are just
radiophobic.”
In an interview in
his offices in Kiev, Vitalii Petruk, head of the Exclusion Zone Management
Agency, denied any illegal logging had taken place since he assumed the job in
September. But since the revolution, he is the fifth director of the zone,
which like the rest of Ukraine has been in a state of flux.
Loggers fell burned
trees after forest fires, to avoid pest outbreaks, and cut firebreaks and
routes for electrical wires, he said. Since 2004, it has been legal in Ukraine
to sell timber from the zone if it passes radiological controls.
Petruk is an
unabashed advocate of increased commercial activity in the zone, including
logging.
“How do we turn our
shame into our advantage?” he said. His answer is “Zone of Change,” a proposal
by his agency for increased logging to feed a chip-fueled steam-power plant at
the site that he noted would reduce dependence on Russian natural gas.
The concept of the
Exclusion Zone, an important experiment for the nuclear industry, was to limit,
through isolation, the lethality of an accident at the nuclear plant.
Radioactive elements degrade at predictable intervals, called half-lives, that
can vary enormously. Particles left in the soil while their half-lives tick
past harm nobody; the average particle half-life at Chernobyl is about 30
years.
But logging in a
postapocalyptic forest would pose a number of health concerns. Trees, like
moss, absorb radiation from the subsoil. Also, clear-cutting churns up soil,
stirring radioactive dust and accelerating erosion.
At one point along the
road, the forest opens to a clear-cut area of several acres, sliced into
healthy pine groves, though near a burned patch. “Look, they didn’t touch the
dead trees,” Kalmykov said, pointing to the still standing, blackened pines.
A logger, his
sweaty face flecked with dust and sawdust, said he simply cut the trees marked
by his bosses at the Exclusion Zone Administration. “I don’t decide,” said the
man, who declined to give his name. “They say we don’t need the burned logs.”
Asked if he worried
about radiation, he said he did not, as by now the radiation had settled deep
into the soil.
“We stamp it down
so it does not come out,” he said, patting the ground with his boot. “Want to
buy some wood?”
If you answered "Yes, but not radioactive," to the above question, please call Henry Rogers, CCIM, ALC of Coldwell Banker Commercial Benchmark at 904-421-8537, office at 4348 Southpoint Blvd. #310, Jacksonville, FL 32216
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