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Bring It On

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Nobody knew what kind of impact the massive scale of disaster envisioned by the Indemnity Act could have on public health and the environment until Chernobyl exploded and scientists such as Chesser poked though the debris. Some of the most striking findings have surfaced only recently. After Chesser decided to work in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, he couldn't very well study humans –- all of them had permanently fled -– so he baited thousands of animal traps with oats. For years he assembled a veritable nuclear Noah's ark. He collected field mice, voles, shrews, hedgehogs, weasels and even the scat of wolves. Many of these curiosities he brought back to Lubbock and deposited in a mostly off-limits room in the Texas Tech natural history museum.

Last month Chesser arranged to view the radioactive menagerie. He stepped into the museum through a side entrance, signed a logbook in a hallway as loud cooling fans whirred overhead and was escorted by a chirpy curator, Heath Garner, up a cinder-block stairwell past the dour head of a moose ("Alaskan," Garner said). The stairs ended at a regular-looking door that was plastered with a half-dozen assorted safety warnings and radiation symbols. Garner sought to reassure. "We take readings every month to make sure the radiation isn't getting worse," he said.

Inside the room, Garner produced several Ziploc bags holding meaty animal bones. "Here's the stuff that's unprocessed," he said. Chesser grabbed an ancient Geiger counter -– a toaster-sized instrument full of analog dials -– and waved the microphone-shaped sensor over the remains. Nothing happened. "I think you've got a dead battery," Chesser said. He flipped a switch, saw that the battery worked and waved the sensor once more over the bag. Nothing. As he speculated on the bag's provenance, the Geiger counter suddenly erupted. The radiation dial maxed out. The room was filled with a staccato fusillade of clicks. "Okay! Yeah! Now we're getting somewhere!"

The clicks died.

"I'd say you need some work on your Geiger counter," Chesser said.

They placed the instrument aside and Garner pulled a dusty shoebox off a shelf. That is where he combines the fleshy animal carcasses with flesh-eating beetles. "The beetles will strip the flesh off until it's a full skeleton or a full skull," Garner said. "They get between all the single ribs, too." The cleaned-off bones go into carefully labeled vials. The beetles die and go into permanent storage in glass aquariums sitting against a wall. Those too were plastered with radiation symbols.

More radiation warnings adorned the metal cabinet, where Chesser keeps whole animals. He opened a drawer. It revealed two neat rows of stuffed voles, each posed with its front and back paws stretched out like it was a flying action figure. The micelike creatures feast on a diet of cesium-absorbing mushrooms, Chesser explained, making them on average the most radioactive animals in the exclusion zone. But his single most radioactive creature is a weasel -– the most radioactive weasel known –- which he thinks ate a vole.

Chesser picked it out of a drawer with his bare hand. "It was really a hot little dude," he said.

The weasel, a long, skinny animal in a white coat with a sort of racing stripe of brown, was in 1995 the subject of numerous tests for mutations, genetic abnormalities and reproductive health. The result? It was in perfect health. "And very vigorous, as far as I can recall," Chesser said. "Weasels are crazy animals; they will literally chew you from finger to elbow before you know what it's about. I used to have one in an aquarium. Boy, you drop a mouse in it, it will devour it.

"But in all of these animals," he added in reference to his entire collection, "we have not seen any physical or genetic abnormalities."

As results to this effect first trickled in a decade ago, they seemed so preposterous to Chesser that he thought there had to be an explanation. There was simply no way every animal living in one of the most radioactive environments on earth could be perfectly normal. Chesser wondered if years of exposure had killed vulnerable creatures and spared others with a radiation tolerance. So in 1998 he brought in mice from outside the zone and raised them in cages in the Red Forest. Those mice fared just as well as the natives. Only then did it hit him. The health effects of serious, long-term radiation exposure probably weren't, after all, so bad.

"I really think that radiation is a poor toxin," Chesser said. "But as Aristotle said, the dose makes the toxin, and the dose is what's important here. Radiation will kill you with a certain amount of dose; hot water will kill you with a certain amount of heat, but hot water is nice if you need a good bath. It depends upon the degree."

Chesser's animal findings should apply equally well to humans, with one major exception, he said. Weasels and voles outside controlled laboratory conditions don't live long enough to shed much light on radiation's contribution to cancer risk. Initial estimates predicted that Chernobyl radiation would cause 70,000 cancer-related deaths worldwide. Yet that figure was probably almost as alarmist as the mutation fears debunked by Chesser. A comprehensive World Health Organization study completed last year scaled back the cancer-related-death estimate to 4,000.

Four thousand deaths, though awful, deserve perspective: The number pales against the 5,200 Chinese coal miners who in 2004 perished in accidents, the 15,000 Americans estimated by the Harvard School of Public Health to die prematurely each year from coal-plant-induced air pollution, and certainly the millions, if not billions, of deaths worldwide that could result from flooding, ecological collapse and resource wars prompted by carbon-dioxide-driven climate change. "Energy is dangerous stuff," Chesser says. But experience shows our ruling politicians will probably never vote for the energy conservation measures that could help us use less of it. Nuclear power is the only alternative with a chance.

After all, the Houston area is a place where a ship exploded and razed Texas City, oil refineries spawned suspicious cancer clusters, and a recently approved liquefied natural gas terminal could erupt in a giant fireball, and yet hardly anyone complained. What's good for business is good for Houston, the thinking goes. The same equation applies to nuclear power. Potentially flashing radiation over a small nuclear plant town such as Bay City will save us some money on electricity. Nothing new. Except that our gamble would just as certainly help save thousands of lives, the climate and maybe the world.

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