![]() ![]() There is already some - much debated - evidence of increased incidence of leukemia and stomach cancer among Sami as a result of eating radioactive deer meat, contaminated in the 1960s from atmospheric nuclear testing in the Soviet Union. There is little scientific agreement about potential long-term dangers to Sami health drinking contaminated water and eating contaminated foods. Reindeer pastures in Finland were affected only very slightly by Chernobyl fallout and there are no restrictions on the sale of Finnish deer. ![]() During the same period over two-thirds of deer slaughtered in Kautokeino, Norway, were under the 6,000 bq/kilo limit and could be sold. Deer from the Vilhelmina area in northern Sweden averaged 12,000 bq/kilo after November slaughters. Contamination levels gradually decrease to the north. In November, deer radioactivity north of Snasa, Norway, averaged about 70,000 bq/kilo, with a few deer as high as 137,000 bq/kilo. These differences are important, but they appear less striking in comparison to contamination levels in the hardest hit areas of central Sweden and Norway. In November, the Swedish government radioactivity level for salable foodstuffs was 300 bequerels/kilo, while the Norwegian limit was set at a much higher 6,000 bqs/kilo. Scientists express a cautious hope that in the most contaminated areas of central Sweden and Norway radioactivity levels will drop to "safe" levels in 20 to 30 years.Ī bequerel is a new unit of radioactive measurement, representing one nuclear disintegration per second. In some areas, deer are many times more radioactive than is considered safe for domestic consumption or is legally allowable for market sale. The absorption of the major Chernobyl pollutant, cesium 137 (with a half-life of 30 years), by the slow-growing northern lichen has meant serious long-term contamination of many northern Scandinavian pasturelands and of the deer grazing them. Lichen, the main reindeer grazing food, is a biologically remarkable "radioactive sponge." With no underground root system, it must take all its nutrients from the air and thus incorporates airborne contamination to a much greater degree than other vegetation. While direct contact with contaminated air last spring was not seen as posing immediate dangers to human health, the concentration of radioactivity in plants and animals that feed on them posed serious problems of widespread contamination of food - milk, sheep and cows, fish, wild game, berries and especially reindeer. It is only on the basis of a many-leveled understanding of complex threats to Sami people in the aftermath of Chernobyl that we can begin to consider practical attempts to counter both immediate and long-term dangers. Even those Sami least affected by the fallout itself are affected by changing relations between a Sami minority and Scandinavian welfare state bureaucracies, by tensions and misunderstandings between Sami groups with very different experiences of radioactivity, by long-term threats to a Sami reindeer economy increasingly dependent on an outside market. The Sami case makes painfully clear that in trying to assess the effects of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl, we are confronted not only with technical problems of measuring radioactivity levels, charting fallout patterns, and assessing risk factors, but also with the need to understand the interrelated global, national, regional and local community contexts - much too briefly suggested here. ![]() This contamination poses serious threats not only to the health and economic well-being of Sami people, but to their political strength and to a Sami cultural identity bound by material and symbolic connections between humans and reindeer. Scandinavia's indigenous minority, the Sami (also known as Lapps), has been particularly hard hit by Chernobyl fallout, resulting in the long-term radioactive contamination of large areas of Sami reindeer-herding pastureland. It was several days later when they learned that they had actually measured fallout from the nuclear fire and explosion at Chernobyl that for more than a week spewed streams of radioactive material into the atmosphere above the Soviet Union, across eastern Europe and into western and northern Europe. They initially feared that a nuclear accident had occurred in one of Sweden's own 12 nuclear power stations. At the end of April 1986, Swedish nuclear power authorities noted unusually high rates of radiation in routine measurements at a plant north of Sweden. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |