RADIOACTIVITY AND ITS EFFECTS, (THE CHERNOBYL INCIDENT).
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Some nuclei are radioactive, that is they spontaneously emit small particles, and high energy electromagnetic radiation, in doing so they form more stable nuclei. There are three different kinds of radiation, alpha, beta, and gamma. Quantitative studies have shown that alpha and beta are high enrgy particles, and gamma rays are very short high energy wavelengths (electro-magnetic radiation).
Radioactivity has benefitted man in various useful, ways like in medicine, providing nuclear power which can be used by humankind in various situations, but it also has its harmful effects, cause mutations in offspring if the mother is contaminated before birth cancer, and could also lead to evolutionary toxicology, in animals who received huge doses, and live in a radoiactive environment.
In the city of Pripyat, which is very close in proximity to Chernobyl, was once a thriving city, roaring, with forty five thousand people. On April 26, 1986, reactor four of the chernobyl power plant exploded due to flaws in the reactor's design and judgement errors by operators. The explosion belched out tons of radiation, ten times the amount of radiation relased by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 during world war two. The radiation destroyed a lot of land (farm land), " Soviet researchers noted steep declines in wild animals and die offs of small insects and worms living in the forest litter." * There was a lot of mutations too. The city of Pripyat is a ghost town, abandoned by its inhabitants, its surroundings are partly breathtaking . .
Today much of the radioactivity has disappeared. Contaminants with short half lives such as radioiodine have completely decayed, and longer lived ones such as plutonim,and radiostrontium have settled deep into the ground.