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Life today in many ways appears normal in rural areas of Belarus and Ukraine affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. But appearance masks a serious difference: there remains virtually no market for products of these farming areas. The crops and foodstuffs do contain radionuclides, but often at levels well below the conservative limits set by the Codex Alimentarius of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Nonetheless, public perception continues to shun foodstuffs from contaminated areas.
IAEA technical co-operation projects in Belarus and Ukraine are seeking to address this problem by offering cropping alternatives and introducing new technologies. In Belarus, the concept is to promote production of rapeseed and convert its oil into industrial lubricants (greases, oils and other products). Belarus scientists have found that some rape varieties store radioactive nuclides from the soil - caesium and strontium (Cs137 and Sr90) are the ones of concern now - in the stalk and seed coat, not in the seed. Rapeseed oil can be easily processed to make biofuels. Belarus has refineries and therefore the technology and know-how to do this.
IAEA's TC project began in 1995 by assisting its principal counterpart, the Belarus Research Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry (BRISSA), to identify rapeseed varieties that could provide high seed yields in that area, and optimal cultivation conditions and practices. These are crucial factors because while 200,000 ha are suitable for rapeseed, only 40,000 ha can be sown each year to comply with a five-year crop rotation regime.
Several key issues must be addressed: What can be done with the stalks? Can they be buried, or must they be incinerated? Can the protein-rich seed coat be treated to make animal feed and replace some of the expensive food concentrate that is now imported? Can rapeseed be widely grown as a sort of natural 'vacuum cleaner', just to collect radionuclides from the soil?
Over the next few years, the Belarus authorities, with technical assistance from the IAEA, will be working on these issues. The first stage is to develop a pilot plant to process rapeseed oil and produce lubricants. Already, some greases produced on a laboratory scale have been tested at the Technical University in Vienna. This development could lead to scaling up the industrialization process. The required financial support is expected, mostly through the European Union.
An important IAEA restoration effort in Ukraine focuses on milk and milk products from a factory in Ovruch, an historic northern town 100 kilometres west of Chernobyl, which once processed 550 tons of milk a day. Since the accident, production has dipped significantly because the number of dairy cows in the region has declined and milk from the affected areas has varying amounts of radionuclides. The project takes a two-pronged approach: determining the radionuclide content of milk from all sources that supply the plant, so that the agriculture ministry can identify the farms producing contaminated milk and initiate improved on-farm practices; and, at the plant itself, monitoring the level of contaminants in milk and other products during bulk processing.
The project is providing laboratory equipment to the plant and training personnel in using instruments to detect and accurately measure caesium-137 and strontium-90 in incoming milk and outgoing products. The milk plant director Anatoliiy Kushnirchuk is optimistic that dairy farming would increase in the contaminated areas if, in addition to on-farm help, contaminated milk could also be processed in the factory to make radionuclide-free products.
The technology to do the latter may be at hand: magnetic separation. It was recently invented by scientists in Bristol, England, to remove radionuclides from contaminated water at nuclear sites. The patent is now owned and marketed by a company called Selentec in Atlanta, Georgia. It has been tried and tested and "works very well for water... takes everything out", an expert told Inside TC. A large scale test for milk clean up was carried out in the US and confirmed the technology's effectiveness. Field tests in Ukraine were an astounding success. Levels of radioactive caesium-137 were reduced by 95% making the milk safe to drink. The US Government is prepared to invest US$1.5 million in a pilot plant at Ovruch.
Magnetic separation would enable the Ovruch plant to process milk products in bulk, and expand production to fruit juices and baby foods as well. There are some 1.5 million small children who would benefit from this local production of milk and foods. Safe baby food is now 'imported' from other areas and costs savings on transportation alone would be sizeable.
Only when these contaminated lands regain some economic value and produce saleable products will the economic dilemma of rural areas begin to be addressed. Rapeseed and milk products offer a promising new beginning to farm communities that have been very hard hit over the decade since the accident.
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