Word: cesium
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...only because some Europeans are still suffering from the aftereffects of Chernobyl. Sweden was one of the countries most seriously affected, and last week Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who once accepted nuclear power, gave a bitter speech in which he charged that "Chernobyl has spread radioactive iodine and cesium over our fields, forests, marshes and lakes." The accident has cost Sweden at least $144 million in ruined food and threatens the livelihood of 15,000 Lapp nomads who live in central Sweden. The reindeer they raise and the berries and fish they eat have all been seriously contaminated by radiation...
...most frightening part of the nuclear accident was the radiation that spewed from the reactor and then was carried by winds on its silent, deadly path. In the first few hours of the Chernobyl disaster, lethal forms of iodine and cesium were released into the atmosphere. They were accompanied by other highly dangerous radioactive emissions. At first the radiation cloud drifted above some of the Soviet Union's best farmland, but then it moved north toward Scandinavia. By week's end an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores of the Mediterranean...
...damage to the earth around Chernobyl was probably equally severe. Up to 60 sq. mi. of Soviet farmland is likely to remain severely contaminated for decades, unless steps are taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn...
...Brookhaven doctors found that Marshallese food items from the contaminated and uninhabited Rongelap area have an "intake of strontium 90 over a seven day period [that] was twenty times higher than normal and that of cesium 137, sixty times higher than normal." Despite this information, government-sponsored examinations of islanders come only once every three years and only at certain islands. There are no centers established to deal with radiation - oriented symptoms...
...Coal ash is essentially inert and harmless. Used nuclear fuel rods, which are 12 ft. long and ½ in. in diameter and are fastened together in bundles reminiscent of the fasces carried by magisterial aides of ancient Rome, remain very dangerous. Contaminated by such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, they are not only physically hot (at several hundred degrees), but will remain radioactive for thousands of years...