Locals eating radioactive food 30 years after Chernobyl: Greenpeace

People continued to eat and drink foods with dangerously high radiation levels, says Greenpeace, which had been conducting tests around areas contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

Scientific tests conducted on behalf of the environmental groups revealed that overall contamination from key isotopes such as caesium-137 and strontium-90  had fallen somewhat, but lingered, especially in places such as forests.

People in affected areas continued to come into daily contact with dangerously high levels of radiation from the April, 1986 explosion at the nuclear plant that sent a plume of radioactive fallout across large parts of Europe.

"It is in what they eat and what they drink. It is in the wood they use for construction and burn to keep warm," the Greenpeace report, Nuclear Scars: The Lasting legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima, says.

Reuters, which claimed to have seen the report ahead of publication today, the report, eported Ukraine "no longer has sufficient funds to finance the programmes needed to properly protect the public... this means the radiation exposure of people still living in the contaminated areas is likely increasing."