Gone Fission: Chernobyl’s Cooling Pond Fish Farm

Casting a Nuclear Net

Gone Fission: Chernobyl’s Cooling Pond Fish Farm(image via: Jennifer Boyer)

Some of the results were as expected: fish that survived the immediate post-disaster rain of fallout saw shortened lifespans and succeeding generations were afflicted by a wide range of abnormalities and deformities. One Tube-nosed Goby examined in 1991 was found to have grown an eyeball inside its mouth.

Gone Fission: Chernobyl’s Cooling Pond Fish Farm(image via: Eamonn Butler)

The number of human scientific researchers assigned to the radiological study is not known, nor have they been studied by other researchers, which would have been useful but at the same time, uber-creepy. The scientists were obviously in a hurry to get the heck out of there once the study ended in 1996, as they left much of their equipment and jarred samples in place. Well, it’s not like they would have any success pawning the stuff once the origin was mentioned.

Gone Fission: Chernobyl’s Cooling Pond Fish Farm(image via: Andrzej Karon)

Those jarred samples? How best to describe their contents… “jarring”, perhaps. We must assume these samples were saved to illustrate the researchers’ findings and not, one would hope, be someday sent to regional school science classrooms. Nice to know somebody’s thinking of the children for a change.