Chernobyl is NOT a thriving wilderness area, with prospering wildlife!

Beyond Nuclear has had to push back, time and time again, against the dangerous myth that Chernobyl has supposedly resulted in a thriving wilderness, filled with prospering wildlife. For example, on a recent installment of our weekly half-hour radio show on Sputnik News's "Loud & Clear" (from the 24 minute 30 second mark, to the 28 minute 10 second mark), we criticized National Public Radio -- infamous for its pro-nuclear power bias, even in the face of catastrophic reactor meltdowns -- for concluding a recent interview with the executive producer of a major wildlife documentary focused on the impacts of climate catastrophe, by portraying Chernobyl as somehow hopeful, a wildlife resilience good news/happy ending/success story. The NPR host failed to challenge the filmmaker's claim that wild wolf populations in the Chernobyl region (out to a radius of tens of miles, largely to entirely free of human habitation, a.k.a. the "Dead Zone") are a sign that the underlying ecosystem must be healthy. To the contrary, Belarussian wildlife biologists, all too familiar with the formerly rural areas surrounding now-abandoned villages, have been warning for more than three decades that rare, threatened, and endangered species inhabiting the Chernobyl exclusion zones are, tragically, awash in hazardous ionizing radioactivity, contaminating their food supply -- bad news for precious, threatened gene pools.