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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Hikaru Amano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 488-492
Environment | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22637
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Field studies were undertaken on both a wetland, which is downgrabient from a radioactive waste storage area at Chalk River Laboratory, and a grassland near Pickering nuclear power station. The purpose for this study was to quantify HTO (tritiated water/vapor) transfer in the land surface environment. The amounts of evaporation and transpiration were separately estimated, because the specific activity of tritium (HTO) is commonly different between surface and subsurface soil. Most of the water and tritium fluxes are attributed to transpiration in the season examined. Measured tritium concentrations in leaves at daytime agreed with predicted values, which are based on a simple equation. The ratios of organically bound tritium (OBT) to free water tritium ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 in this study.