[HN Gopher] Norway to Monitor Airborne Radioactivity in Svalbard
___________________________________________________________________
Norway to Monitor Airborne Radioactivity in Svalbard
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-09-27 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.highnorthnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.highnorthnews.com)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Kinda surprised they haven't been doing this since the 60's...
| What with the cold war being a thing...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| fundatus wrote:
| 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...
| jenadine wrote:
| Not only Chernobyl, but also mostly nuclear weapon tests
| during the cold war.
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
| schiffern wrote:
| 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/
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| driverdan wrote:
| The title of this is misleading. The article says the only thing
| that's changing is ownership.
| staplung wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| 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...
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| > 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
| tuukkah wrote:
| 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| 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?
| estimator7292 wrote:
| A single sensor is cheap. Thousands and tens of thousands of
| installations with a dozen sensors, not so much.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| 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.
| cluckindan wrote:
| 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
| sbierwagen wrote:
| GMC Geiger counters have a usb port, which lets you upload real
| time data: https://www.gmcmap.com/
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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."""
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-09-27 23:00 UTC)