August 2, 2019
By Charles Digges
New international research (click here) has suggested that an enormous radioactive cloud that covered part of Europe in 2017 was produced by a nuclear fuel reprocessing accident at Russia’s Mayak Production Association, despite repeated denials from Moscow that the facility bears any blame.
The report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said further that while the massive release of radiation was not harmful outside of Russia, there may have been more serious fallout in the direct proximity to the site, located near the city of Chelyabinsk near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan....
The actual report from the National Academy of Sciences is worth reading as there is a brief discussion of the beginnings of a radiation detection network in Europe. They have extensive records of times when the people of Europe fell into danger due to radiation detection.
A massive atmospheric release (click here) of radioactive 106Ru occurred in Eurasia in 2017, which must have been caused by a sizeable, yet undeclared nuclear accident. This work presents the most compelling monitoring dataset of this release, comprising 1,100 atmospheric and 200 deposition data points from the Eurasian region. The data suggest a release from a nuclear reprocessing facility located in the Southern Urals, possibly from the Mayak nuclear complex. A release from a crashed satellite as well as a release on Romanian territory (despite high activity concentrations) can be excluded. The model age of the radioruthenium supports the hypothesis that fuel was reprocessed ≤2 years after discharge, possibly for the production of a high-specific activity 144Ce source for a neutrino experiment in Italy....
...Nuclear accidents are serious threats due to their immediate and perceived consequence for both health and environment. The lay public thus relies on the responsibility of their leaders to provide information on radioactive releases and their impact on human and environment health. Early in the 1960s, and even more after the Chernobyl accident, European radioprotection authorities established or strengthened radionuclide monitoring networks on a national scale. Today most of these European networks are connected to each other via the informal “Ring of Five” (Ro5) platform for the purpose of rapid exchange of expert information on a laboratory level about airborne radionuclides detected at trace levels. The Ro5 was founded in the mid-1980s by 5 member countries: Sweden, Federal Republic of Germany, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Today, the memberships have grown to laboratories in 22 countries (while the name was kept), and the Ro5 is still an informal arrangement on a laboratory level and between scientists....
The latest detection of radiation over Europe does not instill confidence in Russia's nuclear program.
August 12, 2019
By Robbie Gramer
Radiation leaks after explosion. (click here) Two days after a mysterious blast at a Russian weapons testing range caused a spike in radiation levels in nearby Severodvinsk, Russia’s nuclear energy authority Rosatom confirmed Saturday that the explosion involved radioactive materials.
U.S. officials and experts believe the explosion, which killed seven, came after a botched test of a new nuclear-powered cruise missile that Russian President Vladimir Putin has trumpeted as central to Russia’s 21st-century nuclear deterrent, the New York Times reports.
“The possibility that this was another Russian mishap with its nuclear-powered cruise missile is looking frighteningly plausible,” said Ian Williams, the deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an email to Foreign Policy....
