Word: cesium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...method, which like radiology was developed around the turn of the century, is simple: food passes through a lead-shielded concrete chamber where radioactive cobalt 60 or cesium 137 bombards it with gamma rays, killing insects and bacteria and sometimes slowing ripening. The food does not become radioactive. "There's nothing in common at all between a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl and an irradiator," says Karl Abraham, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "It's like comparing bananas to tigers." Treated food "can be immediately eaten," says George Giddings, director of food irradiation at Isomedix...
...only because some Europeans are still suffering from the aftereffects of Chernobyl. Sweden was one of the countries most seriously affected, and last week Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who once accepted nuclear power, gave a bitter speech in which he charged that "Chernobyl has spread radioactive iodine and cesium over our fields, forests, marshes and lakes." The accident has cost Sweden at least $144 million in ruined food and threatens the livelihood of 15,000 Lapp nomads who live in central Sweden. The reindeer they raise and the berries and fish they eat have all been seriously contaminated by radiation...
Concern in other European countries remains high. In France, which has 44 nuclear-power plants, an independent group of scientists, farmers and doctors claim they have found significant levels of radioactive cesium in goat cheese, leeks and other foods. In Britain the Foreign Office is investigating the possibility of bringing international legal action against the Soviets in an effort to recover losses incurred by sheep farmers who were prevented from bringing their animals to slaughter because the sheep had eaten contaminated grass...
...most frightening part of the nuclear accident was the radiation that spewed from the reactor and then was carried by winds on its silent, deadly path. In the first few hours of the Chernobyl disaster, lethal forms of iodine and cesium were released into the atmosphere. They were accompanied by other highly dangerous radioactive emissions. At first the radiation cloud drifted above some of the Soviet Union's best farmland, but then it moved north toward Scandinavia. By week's end an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores of the Mediterranean...
...damage to the earth around Chernobyl was probably equally severe. Up to 60 sq. mi. of Soviet farmland is likely to remain severely contaminated for decades, unless steps are taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn...