What Have Sunflowers Got To Do With Nuclear Disasters?

Sunflowers are the international symbol for nuclear disarmament. You will most likely find sunflowers around areas where nuclear disasters have occurred in the past. Following the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine, which released over 100 radioactive elements into the environment, sunflowers were planted in droves to extract the radioactive isotopes from the fallout-impacted sites. This approach is based on the principle of phytoremediation, which employs the use of plants to cleanse the environment. The Chernobyl sunflower project was born in 1994 when a New Jersey-based company planted sunflowers on a floating raft with the intention to absorb radioactive isotopes from the water. It was observed that the plants selectively absorbed radio-cesium (137Cs) and radio-strontium (90Sr) from the water, and results indicated that about 95% of the radio-nuclides had been cleared out in a span of only ten days. In this video, we explore this magical ability of sunflowers in more detail.