Environmental Radioactivity and Radioactive Contamination Problems

Emerging Environmental Justice Issues in Nuclear Power and Radioactive Contamination

Nuclear hazards, linked to both U.S. weapons programs and civilian nuclear power, pose substantial environment justice issues. Nuclear power plant (NPP) reactors produce low-level ionizing radiation, high level nuclear waste, and are subject to catastrophic contamination events. Justice concerns include plant locations and the large potentially exposed populations, as well as issues in siting, ...

Measurement of the radioactivity of 137Cs in materials of plant origin with potential radioactive contamination.

Giant radioactive halos: indicators of unknown radioactivity?

A new group of giant radioactive halos has been found with radii in excess of anything previously discovered. Since alternate explanations for these giant halos are inconclusive at present, the possibility is considered that they originate with unknown alpha radioactivity, either from isomers of known elements or from superheavy elements.

Radioactive contamination of scintillators

Low counting experiments (search for double β decay and dark matter particles, measurements of neutrino fluxes from different sources, search for hypothetical nuclear and subnuclear processes, low background α, β, γ spectrometry) require extremely low background of a detector. Scintillators are widely used to search for rare events both as conventional scintillation detectors and as cryogenic s...

Thule-2003 - Investigation of Radioactive Contamination