My friend Makar studied how radiation affected populations of mice. I mean, he actually caught great numbers of mice somewhere on Urals in a disaster zone. The conclusion was: mice adapted, there are no statistically distinguishable differences compared to a normal population.

"They are 75, 80 and 81 years old" -- Well, if I was 81 years old, I wouldn't care all that much about radiation either.

I spent part of 2 summers (in '98 & '00) in some of the cities/villages near the exclusion zone (as close as 30-40 miles from the plant). Seen the road barriers and warning signs. Met kids and adults with cancer from the radiation.

Ukraine has a wonderful culture and beautiful people. It's a shame that this happened to them.

I was looking up more about the current state of Chernobyl and this came up.

http://www.kiddofspeed.com

This is a great story, but I think it might not be totally true.

I thought this was outed as a hoax years ago. E.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/06/world/fg-chernobyl6

oh wow!