Word: cesium
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...contamination in the Arctic is not only an American problem. Similar high levels of cesium 137 have been found in Scandinavia among the Laplanders. These countries have kept close watch on the problem for several years...
Illumination soft as starshine can be focused on one end of a six-inch glass tube, where it knocks electrons loose from a photosensitive layer of cesium and antimony. The free electrons are whisked to the opposite end of the tube by powerful electrostatic charges and they hit the far wall with considerable energy. The collisions build a picture on a phosphorescent screen, a picture that is 1,000 times brighter than the original. Picked up by a TV camera and projected on a TV picture tube, the scene can be brightened still more...
After two weeks of getting to know the family, it's time to come out again into the brave new world. This is because after two weeks what is called "early fallout" has all fallen out (of the sky). A few radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137, and carbon 14, however, may remain aloft for months, and are therefore referred to as "delayed fallout." The Defense Department considers delayed fallout "less dangerous," even though "the long-term damaging effects of such exposure (to delayed fallout) are not yet known in great detail." So you needn't worry about...
...sense this is fortunate: while the deadly stuff is hanging many miles above the earth, its short-lived isotopes disintegrate and virtually disappear. But two of its most dangerous constituents, strontium 90 and cesium 137, would not fade into harmlessness even if they floated in the stratosphere for a century. And fact is that few fission products stay up nearly so long...
Inexorable Climb. The stratospheric circulation has its greatest effect in late winter and early spring, and that is when the Public Health Service expects the Soviet strontium 90 and cesium 137 to fall most heavily. Most of the fallout will contaminate the temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, where the bulk of the world's population lives...