Legacies of Chernobyl
There are other ways in which the radioactivity released by the Chernobyl accident continues to threaten human life and the environment. In the spring of 2020, forest fires broke out in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Trees store radioactive isotopes – but when they burn, the radioactivity is released into the air. In the early days of the fires, the wind blew north, towards rural areas of Russia and Belarus. Then it shifted south, blowing towards Kyiv.
Radioactivity from contaminated regions is also released into the air by digging up the ground. Before Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the governments of Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland were considering plans to build a 2,000-kilometer waterway, the E40. It would extend from Gdańsk at the Baltic Sea to Kherson at the Black Sea, passing through Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. The waterway would deepen the Pripyat riverbed, straighten its course, and create dykes and dams. The E 40 waterway project has encountered substantial resistance from environmental groups. Deepening and straightening the Pripyat River threatens to destroy the unique ecosystem of the Polesian marshes, Europe's greatest intact floodplain region. Its wetlands would dry up and its peatlands (which store carbon) would omit carbon into the air.
The construction of the E40 waterway – a section of which would pass only 2.5 kilometers away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant – also threatens to release large quantities of radioactivity into the air. After the Chernobyl accident, some of the radioactive substances sank to the bottom of the Pripyat River. Nuclear fallout also contaminated the Kyiv reservoir, a large, artificial water reservoir located between Chernobyl and Kyiv. Its water is used for crop irrigation. Constructing the E 40 waterway would thus not only disturb radiological hotspots and resuspend contaminated sediment, See the study conducted by the French NGO Association pour le Contrôle de la Radioactivité dans l'Ouest: "Chernobyl Heritage and the E40 Trans-Europe Waterway", January 2020, 1–46. Study Commissioned by the Frankfurt Zoological Society. https://www.acro.eu.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/RAP_E40_en-FINAL.pdf Last accessed June 18, 2024. which the International Atomic Energy Agency has recommended to leave undisturbed. It would also expose construction workers to dangerous levels of radiation and threaten to contaminate the drinking water of millions of people.
Since Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022, the joint Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian project has come to a halt, but not the plans as such. In Poland, planning is underway for the construction of several dams along the Vistula River. Environmental groups fear that dividing the E40 project into smaller sections will make it easier for the respective governments to bypass environmental legislations and concerns.
| « Contamination Today | Russia's War Agaiont Ukraine » |