That's what natural selection is. We focus on those that survived because they developed resistance to something, but it has always meant that everybody else died and the species as a whole has moved forward.

"We are the cancer now"

I, for one, (a vampire Goth) fear for my life when our werewolf overlords enter society ...

A mutation for having a higher radiation resistance or higher resistance to cancer is something that already happens in nature, but in most of the animal world those are relatively useless traits, normally cancer doesn't develop fast enough to stop procreation.

In Chernobyl, the highly elevated radiation would normally kill animals before they can even breed. The ones that don't have the resistance die before they get the chance, the ones that do have a higher resistance breed.

With humans in the modern age, a resistance to cancer or radiation trait never gets the chance to become a dominant evolutionary trait as most all people only develop the cancer later in life and the ones that do get cancer early more and more often can get treatment giving them a chance to procreate even when they got cancer young.

Outside Chernobyl, there is no evolutionary pressure for a trait like that to become dominant.

Living long enough to procreate is the primary drive in nature.

We generally don't see fast evolutionary changes in nature because nature doesn't change quickly often.

Leave it to us, humans, to create situations where the change is drastic and quick.

If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won't take that long. If the radiation kills off a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won't take long at all.
Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.

The thing is, the exclusion zone isn't uniformly radioactive. The hottest spots are not areas that wild life would normally spend a lot of time near.

Then there's the fact that the way we're all taught about radiation and cancer is just flat out wrong. The Linear No Threshold model that most people know was actually created by the Rockefeller Foundation in an attempt to slow the adoption of nuclear power.

Combine those two factors, and you get stories like this, where researchers are shocked that higher than average radiation exposure doesn't equate to a simple linear increase in cancer rate.

Not that these wolves haven't developed an increased resistance to radiation. But it's not a new thing. Every living creature on this planet has mechanisms to repair DNA from radiation exposure. These wolves are simply better at it now than generations past.

High evolutionary pressure + large gene set = fairly rapid adaptation

evolution could happen in jumps. How often that happens is debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

"Wolves of Chernobyl" is a song by Municipal Waste, already

So radiation does give you powers ?

Well.. radiations selects for powers.

Nah, just filters out those that are weaker/less resistant.

Everyone has radiation resistance. Our DNAs repair mechanisms protect us from DNA errors from all sorts of sources.

A region where high radiation exposure becomes daily life simply makes the this trait the dominant one for animals to live long enough to procreate, meaning the ones with the best mechanisms will survive, the others die.

Kyle Hill has some pretty good videos on this topic: https://youtu.be/bmVGwOP_zi8?feature=shared

My understanding is that while the fallout from Chernobyl wasn't very dangerous, and didn't lead to a noticeable increase in cancer rates, the area around the reactor is still very dangerous due to the debris from the reactor core that's scattered around.

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I think the only "power" you get from radioactive wolves is death.