Summary: Some interviews drive by, others stay for the deep record. This week I have two heavy-hitters for you. Right out of the international news, forest fires near the Chernobyl nuclear wreck in Ukraine have raised dangerous radioactive particles into the atmosphere - again. We have Dr. Timothy Mousseau, the world's foremost expert on the impacts of Chernobyl, and Fukushima radiation on living things. Then Utah scientist Tim Garrett updates his work showing only a collapse of civilization could prevent terrible climate change. There are new discoveries, about our utter dependence on fossil energy, and where that leads. Both of these are important interviews for the record. So I'm going to share my detailed notes, with some quotes. There's lots to learn, and many shocking facts. Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 Mb) Or listen on Soundcloud right now! DR TIMOTHY MOUSSEAU - EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST AND SPECIALIST ON IMPACTS OF NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS ON LIVING THINGS. The largest fire in 20 years is burning near the crippled Chernobyl nuclear plant. The smoke will re-release radioactive contamination dropped in the forests during the 1986 melt-down of Reactor number 4, possibly the world's worst nuclear disaster. How can radiation remain and return? What is the real risk? Scientists have been hard at work studying this problem. Just this February, the journal Ecological Monographs published a paper titled: "Fire evolution in the radioactive forests of Ukraine and Belarus: future risks for the population and the environment." Dr. Timothy A. Mousseau is a co-author of this paper, and recommended to Radio Ecoshock by the lead author, Norwegian scientist Nikolas Evangeliou. Tim is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Mousseau joins us on Radio Ecoshock. Here are my detailed notes, in the order each topic appears in the interview. 1. Mousseau started studying radiation effects on living things in the Chernobyl area in the year 2000, and has returned the area 3 to 4 times a year ever since. 2. I ask about the meme saying life is thriving in the highly radioactive Chernobyl closed zone. It is true that nature has returned. But everything from plants (such as trees) to animals (including birds) are suffering some impacts. (More about that later). 3. The Chernobyl radiation affected the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Northern Europe (including Britain) the most. But it went around the world and can still be found as a marker in oceans in the Northern Hemisphere as well. The areas of highest contamination are within a couple of hundred kilometers of Chernobyl. Mosseau compares the fire that burned in the Chernobyl reactor for ten days to a volcano that erupts radioactive materials. 4. How does it work? How radiation enters the fibres of plants and cells of animals. "The dominant isotope at Chernobyl, and at Fukushima too for that matter, is Cesium 137. And Cesium 137 is a potassium analog. It behaves chemically much like potassium does. And so the plants actually mistake it, confuse if for potassium, and take it up as if they were taking up potassium. This Cesium gets taken up by the plants in the water, transferred to the leaves, and into the tissues. And so it gets moved around. Even though most of the fallout is in the soil, it gets taken up in the water through the plant root system up into the leaves - and then redeposited on to the surface soil every year as the plants drop their leaves during the Fall." To me, the horror of this is partly that we expected radiation in the soil to gradually be buried by plant debris and subside, away from the surface. Instead, roots keep grabbing the Cesium 137 and recycling it to the surface with leaf litter each year. Find a BBC article about the impacts of Chernobyl on tree growth here. 5. Fires near Chernobyl at the end of April 2015. Estimates are a few hundred to a few thousand acres of forest have been burned. I
