Radioactive wolves

[Cibach]

It just goes to show how wild animals do far better without us!!

At the time of the Chernobyl incident I was working in the nuclear medicine dept. of the local hospital. Our dept. was responsible (among a lot of other things) for radiation monitoring.
We had quite a few enquiries from the general public as the radiation cloud passed over Wales on a very rainy day and indeed quite a bit of contamination fell on us.
On the whole most people who asked to be monitored had very little above general background and indeed the "Glow in the dark" faces of their watches gave off more radiation.

But some of the hill farmers were not so lucky. The radiation that came down with the rain contaminated quite a bit of pasture and the sheep that ate the grass then had contaminated meat which couldn't be allowed into the food chain.
As a dept. we measured samples of the meat for years.
I left the dept. in 1996 to have my daughter and measurements were still being made then some 13 years after the incident with the meat still too contaminated to be edible.
The radioactive material has a very long half life and was coming up in the grass, being eaten by the sheep, and a portion of it was being deposited back onto the grass by the sheep's droppings etc.

I didn't keep up with the studies but it wouldn't surprise me if they are still ongoing.
The farmers were suitably compensated for their sheep and the fact that they could not use the pasture for sheep for the food industry. The wool was ok to use which is why there were sheep to measure so long after the incident.

What a mess we make of our world.