Thousands of radioactive boars are overrunning farmland in Fukushima
Nuclear catastrophe is always an unmitigated disaster. The only
beneficiaries, albeit in a perverse fashion, are animals, which tend to
flourish in areas humans evacuate. This has certainly been the case for
wild boars around Fukushima, which have multiplied so rapidly, they’ve
become a problem for neighboring towns.
On Friday, March 11,
2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck offshore near Tokyo and caused a
30-foot high tsunami that crashed into Japan’s coast, killing 18,000
people, according to The Washington Post.
Water poured into the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daichi
nuclear power plant, flooding the generators designed to keep the
plant’s reactors cool. Later that day, an explosion rocked the plant,
and more than 200,000 residents living within 12 miles were evacuated as
radioactive material began leaking into the surrounding land. In the
ensuing days, two more explosions shook the plant, and several fires
broke out.
It was a true nuclear meltdown.
Since 2011, no
humans have been able to live on the poisoned land. Wild boars,
meanwhile, have thrived heartily. No evidence suggests that the
radioactive contamination harms the beasts, and the lack of people there
to hunt them has allowed them to breed with abandon.
Boars aren’t the only animal to flourish in the wake of nuclear disaster, as Sarah Kaplan reported in the Post
in October. Following the Chernobyl catastrophe, elks, wolves, bears
and lynx flourished without humans around to hunt them. Ten years after
the meltdown, “every animal population in the exclusion zone had at
least doubled.”
“That wildlife started increasing when humans
abandoned the area in 1986 is not earth-shattering news,” Tom Hinton, a
radio-ecology expert who has studied the aftermath of Chernobyl told The Washington Post.
“What’s surprising here was the life was able to increase even in an
area that is among the most radioactively contaminated in the world.”
Data: 11.04.2016
Fonte: www.washingtonpost.com
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