Word: strontium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...world's neutralists for piously suspending nuclear tests, and just after the U.S. announced its decision to suspend tests for one year-the Russians had carried out at their Arctic test site a series of nuclear explosions so "dirty" that they increased the concentration of radioactive strontium 90 in the stratosphere by about 50%. They were by far the dirtiest nuclear tests since the much blamed U.S. tests in the Pacific...
...noted a new theory, put forward by Physicist E. A. Martell of the Air Force's Cambridge, Mass. research center, that radioactive debris from nuclear explosions near the poles drifts down to the earth much faster than fallout from explosions near the equator. If the theory is correct, strontium 90 and other harmful isotopes from Soviet tests in October will sprinkle the earth heavily during the next several months...
Fact is that antlers are superb collectors of radioactive fallout. Like bones, antlers are made largely of calcium compounds, and radioactive strontium behaves chemically like calcium. Deer ingest strontium with their forage. In slowly maturing humans, only a small part of the skeleton is built each year, and therefore human bone shows an averaging of strontium over many years. But a deer's antlers are grown afresh each year, concentrating in a handy package a calcium-strontium mixture that neatly records the prevalence of strontium for that year alone...
...fallout material dumped on them by Scotland's heavy rains. In this week's Nature two scientists from Glasgow's Royal College of Science and Technology report on an antler taken on the Island of Islay in 1957. It proved to have 126 micromicrocuries of strontium radioactivity per gram of calcium. A cross section cut from it and laid on X-ray film for 82 days gave off enough atomic radiation to take a sharp picture of itself. For contrast, an antler that grew in the same place in 1952, before the H-bomb tests, showed only...
...result of bomb tests to date, caesium 137 dosage in Japan and the U.S. will rise by one hundredth of a rem per capita over the next 30 years. The strontium 90 rise in the next 70 years will vary in each country. For milk-drinking Americans, it will average an estimated .16 rem (or roughly the present dosage from X rays). For rice-eating Japanese, whose crops draw in more strontium because their soil lacks calcium, the per capita increase will be nearly...