8,000 Radioactive Reindeer

Norway’s Lapps must destroy thousands of radioactive reindeer this Christmas as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster casts its shadow over the Lapps’ livelihood nearly 20 months after the accident, authorities said today.

Herders in the mountains of southern Norway, the area hardest hit by deadly cesium-137 released in the May, 1986, blast at a power station in the Soviet Union, must discard about 8,000 reindeer carcasses, researchers said. About $2.3 million will be paid to about 200 Lapp families whose entire annual income for centuries has hinged on the sale of meat from their herds.