Radioactivity in the Romanian Black Sea Sector One Decade after Chernobyl

Radioactivity monitoring in the marine environment was imposed by the increasing development of nuclear energetics and its world-wide use in many different activities [1]. Both natural and artificial radioactivity play an important role in marine ecology and human health; in this respect three major facts continue to prevail in Romania: the fallout, the presence of the Danube river, and the future nuclear energy production by using of five CANDU reactors under construction at Cernavoda. Spatial and temporal monitoring of marine radioactivity along the Romanian Black Sea shore has been systematically perfomed by the Romanian Marine Research Institute (RMRI), in close co-operation with the Research Laboratory of Environmental Radioactivity (RLER) belonging to the Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (until 1990) and to the Research Institute for Environmental Engineering (REIE) afterwards, since 1991.