It's interesting to note how the West discovered there had been a nuclear accident in the USSR when Chernobyl exploded. The Forsmark reactor in Sweden detected the fallout on the clothing of workers returning to the plant after lunch, IIRC.
Surprised this station seems to post-date that? Seems like it would have been handy to have in the Cold War. Then again, Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard so maybe that has something to do with it.
Similarly, in 1984, a truck carrying unexpectedly radioactive steel rebar took a wrong turn into the entrance of Los Alamos National Laboratory and set off radiation detectors at the gate intended to detect radioactive contamination on workers leaving the site.
This triggered an investigation which traced the contamination to the improper disposal of the active element of a retired medical radiotherapy machine that used cobalt-60 - the radioactive cobalt ended up mixed with a large batch of other scrap metal, contaminating (among other things) ~6,600 tons of rebar, much of which had already been shipped at the time this was discovered...
> Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard
Not only a mining presence [1]: "After the war, the Soviet Union proposed common Norwegian and Soviet administration and military defence of Svalbard. This was rejected in 1947 by Norway, which two years later joined NATO. The Soviet Union retained high civilian activity on Svalbard, in part to ensure that the archipelago was not used by NATO."
Probably. Barentsburg, west from Longyearbyen, is predominantly a Russian mining village. Svalbard is interesting in that it is part of Norway but citizens of some other countries are granted more rights than they’d have in the rest of Norway, and Norway also is not allowed to operate its military from Svalbard.
The first anomaly was detected by the Finnish defence forces in Kajaani already the previous day, Sunday evening at 8:40pm local time, but they didn't understand the small deviation was very important and probably suspected it was a minor error in the measurements. Only on Monday at 10am the Nuclear Safety Authority started to investigate properly and published information at 4pm - not early enough to let Forsmark know they wouldn't have needed to evacuate the plant as a precaution.
They did have ways to detect nuclear incidents before then. Vela satellites for example. They seem to have been more tuned for detecting nuclear bombs vs generalized fallout however. Maybe others can speak more towards this.
Yeah, the Vela sats could spot nuclear detonations, but didn't sniff for trace isotopes or anything like that. They were in way too high an orbit for any traces to make it to them anyhow.
How technically challenging is this? I would expect that all weather monitoring stations are already kitted out with all the detectors they can bolt onto the air intake. CO2, oxygen, air pressure, humidity, radioactivity, love in the air, whatever.
If you already have the facility why not record everything? Or is a good radiation detector a $$$$ investment?
I don’t know… we have radioactive elements with a very long half-life, which I assume would be great for calibration: somewhat safe and low activity, so good match for atmospheric concentrations of common radionuclides
They were it was just handled by the Finns prior. The weather station is just changing hands which likely happens on a semi regular basis so this isn’t a new development.
It seems to me that the activity will just be continued.
For some reason Finland didn't want to runt it anymore and
Norway took over.
"""The Finnish Meteorological Institute is to discontinue its air monitoring in Svalbard, and on October 1st, the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) will take over ownership of its air sampling equipment."""
Wild mushroom in some parts of Germany are still radioactive to this day exactly because of this. After Chernobyl, clouds with radioactive particles moved west and then started raining over Germany. Certain species of mushroom tend to accumulate the Caesium-137 from that and these mushroom then get eaten by wild animals. To this day if you sell wild animals that were shot in these areas you have to get them tested. They regularly exceed legal contamination levels deemed safe for human consumption.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram. [1]
One of my relatives freaked out the summer after Chernobyl accident happened, when finding some glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in the forest nearby. Upon examination by a pro they turned out to be naturally bioluminescent fungi.
There have been proposals to remediate contaminated agricultural areas by sporulating and harvesting mushroom species that concentrate radiocesium.
What amazes me is the mushroom mycelium are actually sorting out the radioactive material grain by grain, which would be highly impractical any other way.
And I vaguely remember an eminent Norwegian professor in the field of radiation said he would buy an extra freezer so he could buy up cheap reindeer meat. The slaughtering was probably unnecessary.
I suspect it’s a matter too of where the radiation accumulates. Looking up the products from Chernobyl:
The body mistakes cesium for potassium, this one I already knew from documentaries about Bikini. Half life of 30 years, but it surprisingly doesn’t bioaccumulate (biological half life of 70 days is not great but isn’t a death sentence). But it does accumulate in soft tissue, so you’re gonna eat it.
Radioactive iodine is a bit scary, but what came from Chernobyl has a half life of 8 days, so I could see how a freezer would be very useful there.
Strontium-90 is the scary one. That is mistaken for calcium. And has an average biological half life of 18 years, but that depends very much on where it got absorbed. Anywhere from 14 days to 49 years. And a 29 year half life, similar to cesium-137. Muscles need calcium to function, but most of it is stored in the bones, so maybe this is what the scientist meant?
Grass contains both calcium and potassium, though the thing about Scandinavian reindeer is that they eat a lot of lichen in the winter. It’s why they are so historically important to the traditional diet. But then Chernobyl happened in the Spring, so the reindeer would be accumulators.
It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.
Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.
It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.
It's interesting to note how the West discovered there had been a nuclear accident in the USSR when Chernobyl exploded. The Forsmark reactor in Sweden detected the fallout on the clothing of workers returning to the plant after lunch, IIRC.
Surprised this station seems to post-date that? Seems like it would have been handy to have in the Cold War. Then again, Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard so maybe that has something to do with it.
Similarly, in 1984, a truck carrying unexpectedly radioactive steel rebar took a wrong turn into the entrance of Los Alamos National Laboratory and set off radiation detectors at the gate intended to detect radioactive contamination on workers leaving the site.
This triggered an investigation which traced the contamination to the improper disposal of the active element of a retired medical radiotherapy machine that used cobalt-60 - the radioactive cobalt ended up mixed with a large batch of other scrap metal, contaminating (among other things) ~6,600 tons of rebar, much of which had already been shipped at the time this was discovered...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
> Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard
Not only a mining presence [1]: "After the war, the Soviet Union proposed common Norwegian and Soviet administration and military defence of Svalbard. This was rejected in 1947 by Norway, which two years later joined NATO. The Soviet Union retained high civilian activity on Svalbard, in part to ensure that the archipelago was not used by NATO."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard#Second_World_War
Wouldn't "high civilian activity" refer primarily to miners?
Probably. Barentsburg, west from Longyearbyen, is predominantly a Russian mining village. Svalbard is interesting in that it is part of Norway but citizens of some other countries are granted more rights than they’d have in the rest of Norway, and Norway also is not allowed to operate its military from Svalbard.
The first anomaly was detected by the Finnish defence forces in Kajaani already the previous day, Sunday evening at 8:40pm local time, but they didn't understand the small deviation was very important and probably suspected it was a minor error in the measurements. Only on Monday at 10am the Nuclear Safety Authority started to investigate properly and published information at 4pm - not early enough to let Forsmark know they wouldn't have needed to evacuate the plant as a precaution.
They did have ways to detect nuclear incidents before then. Vela satellites for example. They seem to have been more tuned for detecting nuclear bombs vs generalized fallout however. Maybe others can speak more towards this.
Yeah, the Vela sats could spot nuclear detonations, but didn't sniff for trace isotopes or anything like that. They were in way too high an orbit for any traces to make it to them anyhow.
The title of this is misleading. The article says the only thing that's changing is ownership.
How technically challenging is this? I would expect that all weather monitoring stations are already kitted out with all the detectors they can bolt onto the air intake. CO2, oxygen, air pressure, humidity, radioactivity, love in the air, whatever.
If you already have the facility why not record everything? Or is a good radiation detector a $$$$ investment?
GMC Geiger counters have a usb port, which lets you upload real time data: https://www.gmcmap.com/
I'd guess you still need to maintain them and confirm their accuracy. Tuning a Geiger counter seems more niche then tuning a humidity sensor.
I don’t know… we have radioactive elements with a very long half-life, which I assume would be great for calibration: somewhat safe and low activity, so good match for atmospheric concentrations of common radionuclides
A single sensor is cheap. Thousands and tens of thousands of installations with a dozen sensors, not so much.
Kinda surprised they haven't been doing this since the 60's... What with the cold war being a thing...
They were it was just handled by the Finns prior. The weather station is just changing hands which likely happens on a semi regular basis so this isn’t a new development.
It seems to me that the activity will just be continued. For some reason Finland didn't want to runt it anymore and Norway took over.
"""The Finnish Meteorological Institute is to discontinue its air monitoring in Svalbard, and on October 1st, the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) will take over ownership of its air sampling equipment."""
I vaguely remember like a decade ago, maybe two, they had to slaughter a ton of wild reindeer that had become radioactive
Turned out they had been eating grass that had become radioactive somehow from drifting fallout from Chernobyl?
Once the radioactivity gets into the dirt it just sits there for years and years
Wild mushroom in some parts of Germany are still radioactive to this day exactly because of this. After Chernobyl, clouds with radioactive particles moved west and then started raining over Germany. Certain species of mushroom tend to accumulate the Caesium-137 from that and these mushroom then get eaten by wild animals. To this day if you sell wild animals that were shot in these areas you have to get them tested. They regularly exceed legal contamination levels deemed safe for human consumption.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram. [1]
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
One of my relatives freaked out the summer after Chernobyl accident happened, when finding some glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in the forest nearby. Upon examination by a pro they turned out to be naturally bioluminescent fungi.
Not only Chernobyl, but also mostly nuclear weapon tests during the cold war.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
There have been proposals to remediate contaminated agricultural areas by sporulating and harvesting mushroom species that concentrate radiocesium.
What amazes me is the mushroom mycelium are actually sorting out the radioactive material grain by grain, which would be highly impractical any other way.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/stein1/
And I vaguely remember an eminent Norwegian professor in the field of radiation said he would buy an extra freezer so he could buy up cheap reindeer meat. The slaughtering was probably unnecessary.
I suspect it’s a matter too of where the radiation accumulates. Looking up the products from Chernobyl:
The body mistakes cesium for potassium, this one I already knew from documentaries about Bikini. Half life of 30 years, but it surprisingly doesn’t bioaccumulate (biological half life of 70 days is not great but isn’t a death sentence). But it does accumulate in soft tissue, so you’re gonna eat it.
Radioactive iodine is a bit scary, but what came from Chernobyl has a half life of 8 days, so I could see how a freezer would be very useful there.
Strontium-90 is the scary one. That is mistaken for calcium. And has an average biological half life of 18 years, but that depends very much on where it got absorbed. Anywhere from 14 days to 49 years. And a 29 year half life, similar to cesium-137. Muscles need calcium to function, but most of it is stored in the bones, so maybe this is what the scientist meant?
Grass contains both calcium and potassium, though the thing about Scandinavian reindeer is that they eat a lot of lichen in the winter. It’s why they are so historically important to the traditional diet. But then Chernobyl happened in the Spring, so the reindeer would be accumulators.
It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.
Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.
It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.