Strange radiation cloud making its way across Scandinavia
Russia says don’t blame us
RUSSIA — Russia has not been informed of any emergency situation in regard to nuclear particles detected over the Baltic Sea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, in response to reports that a radiation cloud currently floating across Europe came from within Russia’s borders.
“We have an absolutely advanced radiation levels safety monitoring system and there are not any emergency alarms,” Peskov told reporters. “We do not know the source of this information.”
Radiation sensors in Stockholm, Sweden have detected higher-than-usual, but still harmless, levels of isotopes produced by nuclear fission, probably from somewhere on or near the Baltic Sea, a body running a worldwide network of the sensors said last week.
Nordic country officials, the Associated Press reports, feel the increased radioactivity in Northern Europe may point to a damaged “fuel element” at a Russian nuclear power plant.
Lassina Zerbo, an official with the Comprehensive Nuclear-test-ban Treaty Organization, tweeted in recent days about the event. He outlined a Russian area, marked in orange on a map, from which the radiation may have originated.
“22 /23 June 2020, RN #IMS station SEP63 Sweden detected 3isotopes; Cs-134, Cs-137 & Ru-103 associated w/nuclear fission (at) higher than usual levels (but not harmful for human health). The possible source region in the 72h preceding detection is shown in orange on the map.”
But according to Russia’s TASS news outlet, the country’s two north-western power stations — one near the city of St. Petersburg and another near Murmansk, in the north — are running as normal.
“Both stations are working in normal regime,” the outlet quoted an anonymous official as saying. “There have been no complaints about the equipment’s work. No incidents related to release of radionuclide outside containment structures have been reported.”
But the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, the AP reports, says it has looked into the latest data from the Nordic countries and reported that “these calculations show that the radionuclides (radioactive isotopes) come from the direction of Western Russia.”
“The radionuclides are artificial, that is to say they are man-made. The composition of the nuclides may indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”
However, the institute said a “limited number of measurements” made the source difficult to find.