Spiking radiation levels recorded at Chernobyl are probably due to Russian military vehicles stirring up radioactive dust, according to Ukraine authorities.
Russian forces gained control of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine on 24 February, and reports of firefights at the site led to concerns about the release of radioactive material from the plant, which experienced a catastrophic meltdown in 1986.
The that radiation levels around Chernobyl rose today, but attributed them to “movement of a large number of heavy military equipment through the exclusion zone and the release of contaminated radioactive dust into the air”. The organisation said that the buildings containing the reactor were intact and unaffected.
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from the site record outdoor radiation levels as high as 32.3 microsieverts per hour. Indoor figures are higher than that, but at the University of Liverpool, UK, says that these come from sensors inside the containment buildings and aren't related to environmental levels.
A citizen data-collection service called SaveEcoBot also showed a spike in radiation levels across the Chernobyl power plant. One sensor of 65.5 microsieverts per hour at 9.50pm local time on 24 February, while the same sensor recorded levels around 3 microsieverts per hour in the days before the invasion.
Merk agrees that disturbing dust around Chernobyl could trigger a radiation spike. "You have comparably large amounts of long lived heavy isotopes lying around. All dust has settled with time and major parts will have been washed down into the soil over time," he says. "When a tank is now ploughing through the soil, there can be some remobilisation of particles."
But he stresses that this poses no risk of criticality or explosion at the site. "This is just remobilisation of radioactivity which has been spread during the original accident, like you could have in a storm. Just like a sand storm in Semipalatinsk, the Russian bomb test site, or at ground zero around the US sites in Nevada."
at the University of Manchester, UK, says the levels being seen are well below those that would cause acute radiation sickness, but could be "the sort of thing that will give you cancer in 10, 15, 20 years' time".
"If I'm a radiation worker in a lab at 3 microsieverts an hour, even if I spend ludicrous amounts of time in there, I'm going to be under my dose limit. If I had 60 in my lab, I would be wanting to know why, because at 60 you get up to doses that would make me twitch relatively quickly," he says.
Those measurements are also unlikely to account for the complications that could be caused by breathing in dust to the lungs, says Livens. "Basically, the less that is done in the contaminated regions, the better. It could get very unpleasant if they if they start to breach containment of things."
