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Scientists Made Vodka From Grains Grown in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

How authentic do you need your fancy craft spirits to be? 

Maybe a bottle of vodka distilled using grain and water from the Chernobyl exclusion zone will do the trick — because that’s what a team of scientists from the U.K. and Ukraine want to sell you. The spirit has been labeled Atomik — it’s the first product produced within the radioactive zone that surrounds the closed nuclear power station.

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Exclusion Zone

In case you haven’t seen the terrifying HBO series, (best watched with a bottle of vodka, perhaps) the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Northern Ukraine was the site of a horrific accident in 1986 when its No. 4 reactor exploded during a safety test.

The disaster led to the establishment of a 19-mile exclusion zone around the destroyed reactor, which remains in place today. Some 350,000 people were evacuated from the zone to protect them from dangerous levels of radiation, with most never to return.

Professor Jim Smith from the University of Portsmouth led a team of researchers to grow rye crops within the exclusion zone and then produce vodka. During testing of the crop, they found a radioactive isotope (strontium-90) present at levels that exceed the maximum allowed radiation limit set by Ukrainian authorities.

But you needn’t worry. “This is no more radioactive than any other vodka,” Smith told the BBC.

“Any chemist will tell you, when you distill something, impurities stay in the waste product.

“So we took rye that was slightly contaminated and water from the Chernobyl aquifer and we distilled it.”

Southampton University’s GAU-Radioanalytical laboratory analyzed the vodka and found that any radioactivity was so small that it fell below the threshold of detection. Basically, your chatty barkeep is right: the distillation of spirits really is magical.

Good Booze for a Good Cause

The vodka will be sold by the Chernobyl Spirit Company, a social enterprise that will return 75 percent of its profits to communities affected by Chernobyl.

The drinks are on @ProfJimTSmith of @UOP_SEES, who has made #Chernobyl #vodka?, the first consumer product from the exclusion zone, with profits going to help people in Ukraine still affected by the disasterhttps://t.co/osoR2dqTG2

— SEES, University of Portsmouth (@UOP_SEES) August 8, 2019

Atomik is good booze for a good cause but, Smith says, it also helps prove a point: the main challenge for people who live in the areas surrounding the exclusion zone isn’t the radiation, but a lack of economic development.

"There are radiation hotspots but for the most part contamination is lower than you'd find in other parts of the world with relatively high natural background radiation," he told the BBC. "The problem for most people who live there is [that] they don't have the proper diet, good health services, jobs or investment. 

"We don't have to just abandon the land," Dr. Gennady Laptev told the BBC. Laptev is a Ukrainian scientist and, like Smith, a founding member of the Chernobyl Spirit Company. "We can use it in diverse ways and we can produce something that will be totally clean from the radioactivity."

The Chernobyl Spirit Company is hoping to produce 500 bottles of Atomik vodka this year, once it has cleared a few legal hurdles.

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Matt Shea, Khareem Sudlow