After more than 15 years...

Remember when Mount Pinatubo erupted in '91? The ashes ruined crops and dried up rivers in a large region of Luzon, Philippines. This weekend my son hiked up to the volcano's crate and this is how it looks today. Beautiful! Vegetation is back. It is amazing how nature heals herself. But a volcano's eruption is part of nature unlike what happens in a nuclear plant malfunction. Do you know how long it will take for nature to heal from such a man made disaster?

Look at the pics of chernobyl alot of the buildings are crumbling and growth of plants is overtaking-very eerie and interesting pics tho

Yes, the area around Chernobyl is almost a jungle in places -- but according to my photographer brother, who hopes someday to visit the place, you can't stay in the zone for more than an hour, and you don't dare stray off the sidewalks there. On the concrete, radiation readings are high enough that only obsessed people with cameras go there -- but on the grass, the radiation is drastically higher. So the greenery is beautiful, but deadly.

Have you seen the ferris wheel in some of those Chernobyl pictures? It was never ridden. The grand opening was scheduled for the day after the disaster happened.

Since Japan is so small to begin with, I hate to think how they'll cope with so much of their land contaminated for decades, or perhaps centuries.

What a beautiful LandScape!
If we leave at the Mother Nature to make their work... the world would be different....
Thanks for share!...

that is an amazing picture it looks so peaceful there especially when you know its a volcano

I suspect that when it's all said and done, the area around the plant in Japan won't be any worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Of course, only time will tell. If those two incidents happened today, I wonder if people would be allowed to repopulate them.

It's also true that the U.S. Capitol building has more background radioactivity than is allowed at an operating nuclear plant, since it is constructed of granite.

That is a beautiful picture!