Chernobyl's Aftermath

This was posted up on MetaFilter yesterday and I finally got a chance to look through it last night. Its Elena and her Kawasaki in the Nuclear Aftermath at Chernobyl and is pretty moving. Her English is slightly off but I think that adds to the pages. Looking at the pictures, reading her commentary and just tasting a little bit of what its like is pretty amazing. That and the fact that she's a biker is pretty darned cool too! There's another link to some pictures from a recent return to the cities by survivors who were removed in very, very short order after the evacuation, Lyubov Sirota Returns to Pripyat.

Another link in the thread is to Robert J. Baker, who spells it Chornobyl and has been studying the mutuation rates among the animals and plants near the radioactive center of the disaster. The short answer is that plants and animals seem to be fine and, though the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat have been abandoned, he says that the wildlife is doing better than it was when people were there even amid the high radiation levels. And I learned a cool new (and real) word today. Its in the quote from his site "Studies show that mice exposed to a small chronic dose of radiation live longer than mice that were not exposed. This effect is referred to as hormesis."

For more on hormesis, you can check out An Intro to Hormesis, warning though, its an Angelfire site which means its got pop ups.