High radioactivity seen in Europe, source unknown

HELSINKI: Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant”.

But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesperson with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom, reported that the two nuclear power plants in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.

The Leningrad plant near St. Petersburg and the Kola plant near the northern city of Murmansk, “operate normally, with radiation levels being within the norm,” Tass said. The Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish radiation and nuclear safety watchdogs said this week they’ve spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes harmless to humans and the environment in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic.

VIENNA: Radiation sensors in Stockholm have detected higherthan-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 has said.

The Comprehensive NuclearTest-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) oversees a network of hundreds of monitoring stations that use seismic, hydroacoustic and other technology to check for a nuclear weapon test anywhere in the world. That technology can, however, be put to other uses as well.

One of its stations scanning the air for radionuclides - telltale radioactive particles that can be carried long distances by the wind - detected unusually high levels of three radionuclides last week: caesium-134, caesium-137 and ruthenium-103.

The Stockholm monitoring station “detected 3 isotopes; Cs-134, Cs-137 & Ru-103 associated w/Nuclear fission @ higher[ ] than usual levels (but not harmful for human health)”, CTBTO chief Lassina Zerbo said on Twitter on Friday. The particles were detected on “22/23 June”, he added.

Zerbo’s post included a borderless map showing where the particles might have come from in the 72 hours before they were detected - a large area covering the tips of Denmark and Norway as well as southern Sweden, much of Finland, Baltic countries and part of western Russia including St Petersburg.

“These are certainly nuclear fission products, most likely from a civil source,” a spokeswoman for the Vienna-based CTBTO said, referring to the atomic chain reaction that generates heat in a nuclear reactor. “We are able to indicate the likely region of the source, but it’s outside the CTBTO’s mandate to identify the exact origin,” she added.