Posted on 11/10/2017 5:30:47 PM PST by BenLurkin
European authorities are providing new details about a cloud of mysterious radioactive material that appeared over the continent last month.
Monitors in Italy were among first to detect the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 on Oct. 3, according to a fresh report by France's Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute, known as IRSN. In total, 28 European countries saw the radioactive cloud, the report says.
The multinational Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, which runs a network designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests, also confirmed to NPR that it had detected the cloud.
Based on the detection from monitoring stations and meteorological data, the mysterious cloud — which has since dissipated — has been traced to somewhere along the Russia-Kazakhstan border, according to Jean-Christophe Gariel, director for health at the IRSN.
"It's somewhere in South Russia," he says, likely between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Authorities say the amount of material seen in Europe was small. "It's a very low level of radioactivity and it poses no problems for health and the environment in Europe," Gariel says.
But modeling suggests that any people within a few kilometers of the release — wherever it occurred — would have needed to seek shelter to protect themselves from possible radiation exposure.
"If it would have happened in France, we would have taken measures to protect the population in a radius of a few kilometers," Gariel says. French authorities, he adds, will conduct random checks of foodstuffs from the region to check for possible contamination of agricultural products.
Ruthenium-106 is a radioactive isotope that is not found in nature. "It's an unusual isotope," says Anders Ringbom, the research director of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, which runs radioactive monitoring for that nation. "I don't think we have seen it since the Chernobyl accident."
The IRSN analysis suggests that the ruthenium did not come from a nuclear reactor accident. Instead, it most likely came from either the chemical reprocessing of old nuclear fuel or the production of isotopes used in medicine. Based on the size of the release, Gariel says, whatever happened had to have been accidental.
"It's not an authorized release, we are sure about that," he says.
A handful of Russian nuclear facilities are located roughly in the region where the ruthenium originated, including a large nuclear reprocessing plant known as the Mayak Production Association.
During the Cold War, the Mayak plant turned used nuclear fuel into material for nuclear weapons. The plant has been the site of numerous past accidents, including a 1957 explosion that rivaled the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Gariel says that while Mayak is a possible source of the cloud, there simply aren't enough data to conclusively link it to the release of radioactive material. He also says he has spoken to Russian safety officials over the past few days and that while they do not dispute his analysis, they are unaware of any incidents in the region in the past few months.
http://beta.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nuclear-waste-accident-20140824-story.html
https://sincedutch.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/10272014-uranium-hexa-floride-uf6-leak-at-honeywell-plant-in-metropolis-illinois-upwind-from-paducah-ky/
Yes, that sums it up. I’m no expert of course, but it would surprise me if North Korean nuke test radiation was the cause of this.
How does something drift west all the way to Italy from Kazakhstan?
So are Iran and Pakistan. Both have nuclear ambitions.
That seems contradictory.
Not at all!
The people within a few km of the release - wherever it occurred - would have had to seek shelter to protect themselves against the slightly higher lifetime risk of cancer. People there who didn't seek shelter but instead stood outside all day, inhaling deeply and drinking unfiltered rainwater, for months, might have a 500% higher risk of someday contracting, e.g., lung cancer, or thyroid cancer, or... - if the radiation hadn't dissipated by itself over time.
And by the time that radioactive cloud passed over, e.g., Germany, the radioisotopes therein had probably already largely decayed, the cloud itself had probably become extremely diluted by fresh air, etc. - so no problem.
I was in Central Europe back in 1986 when Chernobyl blew. Went jogging everyday for an hour... Drank a liter of farm-fresh milk (from pastured cows, which concentrates the levels of radionuclides) everyday... In terms of increased health-risk, probably equivalent to smoking three cigarettes a day for a few weeks.
In short: Modifiers like "increased risk" or "hazardous" are meaningless unless quantified and - for the layman - set in relation to understandable risks.
Regards,
Most of that "something" was probably washed out (removed from the atmosphere by normal precipitation) long before it reached Italy.
What wasn't washed out was diluted by a factor of a thousand.
Did you know that the dust on your outdoor window sills contains particles of dust from the Sahara?
Of course, we're talking about concentrations measured in the ppm, ppb, and ppt here!
Such articles are fear-mongering unless they express the hazard in comparative terms.
Regards,
The farther up the food chain an organism is, the higher the concentration of (non-bio-degradable) contaminants in its food.
Breast-fed babies are higher up than their mothers.
A mother who drinks slightly contaminated cow's milk and then breast-feeds her baby is subjecting that baby to a significantly higher level of contamination.
Regards,
Nope, it is mostly a medical cancer therapy material, also used in certain spacecraft for power.
radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 on Oct. 3
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