FAQ: Nuclear Weapons and Biodiversity

Although nuclear weapons have an unmatched potential to damage human health and the environment, nuclear war and biodiversity loss are interconnected existential threats that are not frequently discussed - or tackled - together. There are clear areas where these crises overlap, from the immediate impacts of radioactivity on ecosystems and the need to remediate the devastating environmental legacy of nuclear weapons use and testing, to the all-encompassing destruction nuclear war could wreak on the world’s ecosystems and food chains. This FAQ attempts to answer some basic questions around the connections and provide a background on how nuclear weapons affect biodiversity and biodiversity protection efforts. 

Nuclear weapons harm the environment long before they are used. Their entire entire cycle - from uranium mining, through production, to the thousands of nuclear tests over the decades, to nuclear waste dumps - has already left a devastating environmental legacy around the world. 

There is also an enormous opportunity cost: eliminating nuclear weapons would have the added benefit of freeing up money to assist with matters such as ecosystem remediation and global conservation efforts.  

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  • How does nuclear weapons production impact the environment?

    The mining of uranium leeches radiation and radioactive materials into the environment leaving mining sites littered with hazardous materials which contaminate ecosystems. Pollutants from the mining of uranium can contaminate aquatic ecosystems for hundreds of years, threatening downstream communities, fish and wildlife.

    Once the uranium has been mined, producing nuclear weapons continues to pose environmental risks. Risks from accidents during the production process, or risk of attack of nuclear facilities in conflict, there is also the concern about long-term storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste remains highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and no solution for permanent isolation from the environment exists. The Hanford site in the US, for example, holds about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste from US. nuclear weapons production, in decrepit tanks underground. By the site’s own admission, innumerable spills and solid waste burials have already taken place, but not been accurately recorded, and the tanks continues to leak. There are many more examples of mismanagement, accidents, and problems with clean up from nuclear weapons production sites around the world - such as the Mayak site in Russia and Sellafield in the UK - read our case studies here

     

  • What effects has nuclear testing had on ecosystems?

    The more than 2000 nuclear tests carried out by nuclear-armed states over the decades have shown the variety of ways nuclear weapons can damage ecosystems, from the outright destruction of the habitat in the blast and fires following the explosion, to landscape modification, to other long-term effects. For example, the largest underground test of all time (which took place in the Russian Arctic in 1973) created an “explosion [that] had a seismic magnitude of 6.97 and triggered an 80 million-ton rockslide that blocked two glacial streams and created a two kilometer-long lake.”  Near the Semipalatinsk site, where the Soviet Union carried out the majority of its nuclear tests, the soil and vegetation is “heavily contaminated” with Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Plutonium-239, Plutonium-240, and Americium-241. Water bodies in the area are contaminated with uranium “well above the maximum value of 15 µg/L allowed by the World Health Organization.” You can read more about these cases and impacts at other individual sites on our website nucleartestimpacts.org 

    Radiation from nuclear explosions cannot be contained geographically; it respects no country’s border and can take millennia to dissipate completely. The impact of fallout (or black rain) can be hard to predict and trace back because its patterns are complex and heavily influenced by factors like wind and weather. 

    Once a site is contaminated, it impacts an ecosystem from the ground up. Research on the legacy of nuclear testing has found effects ranging from individual organism level, to the local populations, to species higher in the food chain.  For example, the deposition of fallout in the sea because of the atmospheric tests at Novaya Zemlya, in the Russian Arctic, resulted in 3-4 times higher concentrations of plutonium in bottom sediments at Chernaya Inlet, which in turn affected the microbenthic protozoa communities that lived in the sediment.

    Researchers were also able to trace impacts of the radioactive contamination in individual organisms back to nuclear tests:

    • Decades after the devastating tests in the Marshall Islands, corals as far away as Guam showed spikes in bomb-produced radiocarbon for the years of the testing in their annual growth rings,  while inventories found 28 coral species had been lost forever.
    • 20 years after nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands’ Enewetak Atoll ended, scientists found a sea turtle with traces of radionucleides from the test its shell in layers, though it was unclear whether this was from the original exposure, or from the fact that clean-up efforts had actually disturbed the sediments, exposing the turtles again.  Turtles in the Mohave desert, the Savannah River in South Carolina, and Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee have also shown similar traces.
    • A study of radiocesium contamination in boars in Bavaria, Germany traced 68% of that contamination back to global nuclear testing—conducted anywhere from Siberia to the Pacific.  
  • How does radiation (from nuclear weapons) affect individual organisms and species populations?

    While it can be complex to measure the effects of nuclear weapons production, use and testing on the environment and individual species and ecosystems, lethal mutations, immunological changes, physical body changes, and increased tumour rates have been observed in a variety of plant and animal species following exposure to nuclear fallout from nuclear testing and nuclear accidents. 

    More research is needed, because there are several complicating factors: fallout patterns are complex, and different radioactive particles don’t settle in the consistent ways, making it hard to trace or predict what zones are affected; there can also be lack of support (or in the cases of many nuclear tests, even active blocking of access) for thorough research of the environmental impact on affected sites and beyond; and there are massive differences between species’ ability to sustain toxic and genetic effects caused by radiation, and differences in bioaccumulation rates.  

    Bioaccumulation - the gradual accumulation of substances like radioactive elements in an organism, when it absorbs them faster than it can be lost or eliminated by catabolism and excretion - poses a problem at both the species and ecosystem levels. Radioactivity accumulates up the food web and can negatively affect some species—particularly those at the top of the food chain, or those that rely heavily on food items that were strongly affected by the original exposure. 

    Studies from the aftermaths of Chernobyl and Fukushima show how bioaccumulation works and varies across species:  

    • Mushrooms - including edible species - continued to absorb radioactive material from the soil until 2007. 
    • The needles, leaves and twigs from Scots pine trees that have grown in some areas of the exclusion area after the  Chernoby accident show high radiation levels, absorved from the soil. However, through their local deposition, they are believed to restrict the contaminated material from spreading further, which also raises concerns over the potential spreading effects of large scale wildfires.  
    • Predatory fish species - like the Trench  (Tinca tinca) -  retained higher radiation levels for a longer time even when those at the bottom of the food chain no longer show effects of radiation exposure (Koulikov 1996). 
    • Looking at birds in particular, the different species were not all equally affected by radiation exposure, but on average bird populations in both Chernobyl and Fukushima decreased with increasing levels of background radiation.   
    • 10 years after the Fukushima disaster, researchers found that wild Japanese monkeys living in Fukushima City showed high concentrations of 137Cs in their hind limbs, which was likely absorbed by eating buds and bark on local trees, as well as other foods like mushrooms and bamboo shoots, all of which take in radioactive cesium from the ground. 

    While the effect of “exclusion zones” - a visible spike in some species’ population sizes following the departure of humans in the area, as seen after Fukushima and Chernobyl -is sometimes cited to minimise concerns over radioactive contamination, such increases - also seen near cities during COVID lockdowns -  is not an immediate indicator that the ecosystem as a whole is healthy, or that these individual animals and populations themselves will not affected by radiation in the long-term. Elevated radiation has been found to negatively affect the abundance of entire species groups, such as insects and spiders, raptors and small mammals. 

  • Can the environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons be remediated?

    Dealing with the harm we have done to our natural environment is one of the global priorities in environmental protection, and we are nearing the midpoint of the UN’s decade on ecosystem restoration. Efforts to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean must also include dealing with the radioactive legacy of nuclear weapons.  

    Around the world, nuclear weapons facilities have contaminated land and water with radioactive waste lasting at least 100,000 years. Efforts to clean up the sites have cost billions of dollars over decades, and are still largely unfinished and inadequate.  One of the most emblematic examples of the carelessness with which nuclear-armed states dealt with the radioactive legacy of their nuclear tests is with is the Runit dome in the Enetewak (or Bikini) atoll in the Marshall Islands. In the 1970s, the US government spent $105 million to dump over 73,000 m3 of radioactive debris, including plutonium-239 from its nuclear tests into a crater created by these tests and bury it under a huge concrete dome. That dome now shows signs of structural weakness and could crack under the pressure from rising sea levels. The U.S. government now contends that the crater was built to store the debris, not protect the rest of the nearby environment from its contents.

    Of course, it is not only the US that has not dealt with the environmental effects of its nuclear weapons production, testing, and use. The same can be said for the British in Australia, the French in Algeria and in the Pacific, and the USSR in Kazakhstan, for example. 

    Read 5 case studies about (the lack of) environmental remediation

    Read about the Hanford site in the US. 

    International efforts to address nuclear harms, grounded in human rights principles, have increased in recent years. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is the only international legal instrument outlawing the use, and threat of use, of nuclear weapons. It is a successful prevention mechanism, and contains provisions for environmental remediation and victim assistance.  The treaty also assigns responsibility for environmental remediation of areas affected by nuclear weapons use and testing to State Parties who have conducted these acts (Art. 7, para 6). States are currently discussing establishing an international trust fund to support this work.

  • What would nuclear war do to our natural environment?

    While people are often understandably focused on what nuclear war would mean for humans, both the direct and indirect consequences would also be devastating for wildlife, plants and entire ecosystems. The current impacts of nuclear testing and production do not compare to the climatological disaster that would follow even a “limited” nuclear war. 

    For decades, scientists have warned of and modelled the climate disruption that would follow any nuclear conflict.  After the explosion, smoke and dust from firestorms would block sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface and cause an abrupt drop in global temperatures and rainfall, leading to shorter growing seasons and decreasing overall agricultural production and fish stocks worldwide. The launch of just 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons — less than 10% of global arsenals — would release 5 billion kilograms of soot into the upper atmosphere, spreading globally and staying there, and rapidly cool the planet. 

    A nuclear winter would not reverse the effects of global warming. The changes in surface temperature, solar radiation and precipitation, would exacerbate some effects, including ocean acidification and damage to the ozone layer. Recent studies modeling the potential climate effects of nuclear war using crop yields, marine fishery and livestock production as indicators, found that production levels across the board would drop catastrophically, leading to global famine.

    Learn more

  • Could the money spent on nuclear weapons help protect the environment instead?

    Nuclear weapons present a huge opportunity cost in terms of the vast sums of money wasted on these weapons of mass destruction every year.  In 2023, the nine-nuclear armed states spent $91.4 billion on their nuclear warheads and the missiles and bombs used to deliver them, funding a nuclear arms race that puts the entire planet at risk. What could we do if those exorbitant sums were actually used to address real needs instead, putting this money towards things that benefit humanity or protecting our environment? 

    One minute of nuclear spending could pay for planting 1 million trees. One day of nuclear spending could fund 17.12 years of work to reverse the decline of pollinators. One year of nuclear weapons spending could pay for wind power for more than 12 million homes to help combat climate change, clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 years in a row, or cover the current global funding gap for halting biodiversity loss. The Global Biodiversity Framework, through which over 200 countries agreed to halt the decline in nature by the end of the decade, set a target of mobilising at least $200bn (£160bn) per year from public and private sources, but are currently around $80 bln short.

    There are 91 billion better uses for that money than weapons of mass destruction. Help share your ideas on how that money could be used to protect nature here:

    Join the $90 Billion Brainstorm