Large areas of farmland around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that are officially classed as contaminated now appear to be safe to use for growing food, as surveys show radiation levels have fallen below the levels regarded as unsafe according to Ukrainian regulations. Changing the status of this land could help compensate for farmland lost as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“More than 80 per cent of [surveyed] territory can be returned to agricultural production,” says at the National University of Life and Environmental Science of Ukraine, whose team has been assessing the radioactivity of the land for more than a decade.
In 1986, one of four reactors at the nuclear power plant near Chernobyl – or Chornobyl in Ukrainian – went into meltdown during a test, causing an explosion and fire that released radioactive isotopes of elements including iodine, caesium, strontium and plutonium into the atmosphere. The most highly contaminated land was evacuated and farming was banned across a larger area.
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The large quantities of iodine-131 released were the biggest health threat. However, this isotope has a half-life of just eight days, so it declined to negligible levels within years.
Other isotopes, such as caesium-137 and strontium-90, have a half-life of around 30 years, so while levels have more than halved, they remain present in the soil around the region.
In the main exclusion zone closest to the nuclear plant, which may become a nature reserve, levels are still high in many places. But further out, on land that is still officially classified as radioactively contaminated, they have fallen below the threshold regarded as dangerous.
The most recent survey was carried out in 2023 by , also at the National University of Life and Environmental Science. He and his colleagues measured radioactivity levels on 2600 hectares around the settlements of Narodychi and Vyazivka. “We didn’t find a higher level than permissible,” Illienko told 91av.
Altogether, about 130,000 hectares of farmland outside the exclusion zone is classified as radioactively contaminated but could be brought back into use if wider surveys find they are safe, says Illienko.
In places, some fields or parts of fields do exceed the limits, says at the University of Portsmouth, UK. However, in yet-to-be-published work done in conjunction with Kashparov, he has shown that little of this radiation is transferred to crops.
If farming is officially allowed to resume, this should be confirmed by testing food directly as well, he says. “And we’ve also done some modelling of what doses to farm workers would be, and they’re very, very low.”
There should be no issue exporting this food, given that the Ukrainian limits for radioactive contamination in food are much stricter than those in the UK or European Union. That’s because these limits are designed to ensure people don’t get a dangerous cumulative dose over time.
However, the situation on the ground is complex. Some people have already moved into these regions and begun farming them again, leading to legal wrangles about both the sale of this produce and who owns the land.
Some products grown in the “contaminated” regions are already exported, in the form of in the UK, with profits going back to the local communities. Tests confirm there is no radioactivity, says Smith, who is involved in this social enterprise.
The political situation is also complex. There is opposition to the status of the land being officially changed from contaminated to uncontaminated, because this would end compensation payments.
“Radiological agricultural issues are the easiest part of this problem,” says at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv. “The main part is [the] privileges and payments of the people living on ‘contaminated’ territories, which are not really contaminated any more, but the government is unable to announce these territories as uncontaminated because of the threat of massive protests.”
“Government bodies are afraid of negative public opinion,” says Kashparov. “[But] war requires optimisation of the use of public funds.”
Smith says the risks posed by radioactive contamination from the disaster need to be seen in context. We are all continuously exposed to low levels of natural radiation, including from the food we eat.
And while the disaster may have led to around 15,000 deaths from cancers across Europe, including future deaths, this is relatively small in comparison with, say, estimates of deaths due to air pollution, he says.
