radiation leakage occurred after a blast in malin
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After weeks of denying its existence, the Russian government this week acknowledged the strange surge of radiation that billowed over Europe in September.
The French nuclear safety regulator IRSN first detected the radioactive element ruthenium 106 in the air in late September, tracing its origins to the Ural Mountains in the border region between Russia and Kazakhstan. Other European cities like Stockholm, Milan, and Budapest also began picking up radiation traces.
Ruthenium is a rare transition metal. The ruthenium 106 isotope has a half-life of 373 days and is used to treat cancers like melanoma. Since it doesn’t occur in nature, any measured ruthenium 106 is assumed to originate from human activity.
It’s also a byproduct of splitting uranium 235 in nuclear reactors — a hint of the cloud’s possible origin.
IRSN, which said the radiation was no longer detectable as of October 13, concluded that it was an accidental radiation leak and estimated that the amount of radiation released at the source was somewhere between 100 and 300 terabecquerels. That’s enough to require shielding precautions and special cleanup procedures in the region near the origin, but was not a threat to human health farther away. (A terabecquerel is equal to a trillion nuclear disintegrations per second, a measurement of the radioactivity of a substance.)
Patrick Regan, a professor nuclear physics at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, told the Science Media Centre that the radiation most likely originates from a nuclear waste reprocessing plant.
“If it was a reactor leak or nuclear explosion, other radioisotopes would also be present in the ‘plume’ and from the reports, they are not,” he said.
German nuclear observers also ruled out a nuclear power plant accident as the source of the radiation.
For their part, Russian officials denied detecting any leaks or elevated radiation at any of their facilities. This was very odd given that 43 nearby countries reported elevated levels of ruthenium 106.
But finally, in response to an information request from Greenpeace, the Russian meteorological agency Roshydromet released a report this week that acknowledged measurements of high ruthenium 106 levels.
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