(May 30, 1997) At an international conference on radioactivity in the Arctic held in June in Tromso, Norway, figures will be revealed about radionuclides in Canadian waters from Britain's Sellafield reprocessing plant. The contamination, which has never been detected so far north, is having a bigger impact on the Arctic than the Chernobyl accident, according to new Canadian data.
(473.4684) WISE Amsterdam - Iodine-129 from Sellafield has shown up beyond Siberia to the north-western shores of Canada at a depth of 200 meters. The radioactivity is 10 times greater than the background level from nuclear weapons fallout.
It is estimated that Sellafield has released 40,000 billion Becquerels of caesium-137. So far, about 15,000 billion becquerels of this have reached the Arctic.
That is between two and three times more than the contamination from Chernobyl in the same ocean. The largest discharges from Sellafield up to now were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with peaks in 1975, 1977 and 1980.
The same peaks showed up four years later in the Barents Sea. North of Norway the radioactive plume splits itself in two. Part of it goes along the Siberian coast and crosses the North pole towards the Canadian coast, another passes north of Iceland via the south coast of Greenland to the Canadian coast. The research was led by the Bedfors Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Scotland.
Source: New Scientist, 10 May 1997
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