Chernobyl fallout lingers

last updated 8 January 2015

London

Twenty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, British soil is still contaminated with radiation, the government said this week. The Department of Health said that 355 farms in Wales, 11 in Scotland, and nine in England must remain under emergency restrictions because of fallout from the 1986 reactor meltdown in Ukraine, 1,500 miles away. Sheep from those farms often show unacceptable levels of radiation, and must graze elsewhere, on uncontaminated grass, before they can be slaughtered and eaten. “Every time we move a sheep or lamb off our land it has got to be scanned,” Welsh farmer Edwin Noble told the London Independent. “The experience has made me very opposed to nuclear power.”