How does nuclear weapons production impact the environment? What effects has nuclear testing had on ecosystems? How does radiation (from nuclear weapons) affect individual organisms and species populations? Can the environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons be remediated? What would nuclear war do to our natural environment? Could the money spent on nuclear weapons help protect the environment instead?

What effects has nuclear testing had on ecosystems?

Answer

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.