Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Radioactive Krypton in the atmosphere

The radioactivity of atmospheric krypton in 1949–1950
Anthony Turkevich, Lester Winsberg, Howard Flotow, and Richard M. Adams
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=33711

Highlights:

"The work reported here was carried out in the old ruling engine room for grating production in the basement of the Ryerson Physics Laboratory of the University of Chicago."

"As mentioned earlier, atmospheric krypton in the 1990s has a radioactivity of tens of thousands of disintegrations per minute per liter. It is now about a hundred times more radioactive than the samples reported on here."

"The largest current producer of radioactive krypton is the French reprocessing plant at Cap-de-la-Hague, which released 1.8 × 1017 Bq of krypton radioactivity in 1994. If diluted by the whole world's atmosphere, this would produce a radioactivity of krypton of 2,400 dpm per liter (STP). Cap-de-la-Hague's output may represent about half of the present input into the atmosphere of this radioactive nuclide."

1 comment:

Dean W. Armstrong said...

I have to wonder--what will North Korea's reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel do to the concentration of krypton in the northern hemisphere?