A vos compteur !!!

From this confrontation, it can be concluded that the most plausible hypothesis to explain the observations is related to operations in a spent fuel treatment facility located in a region between Volga and Ural. The estimated source term (100 to 300 TBq) corresponds to an event involving a few cubic-meters of fission products solution. The release could have occurred either during a fuel processing operation or during the production of sources from fission products solution. This last hypothesis seems plausible as the 106Ru/103Ru ratio (around 4,000) indicates that the fuel treatment operations were conducted on a fuel characterized by a short cooling time (a few years). In particular, the manufacturing of a 144Ce high activity source planned in 2017 at Mayak radioisotope plant should be investigated.

A massive atmospheric release of radioactive 106Ru occurred in Eurasia in 2017, which must have been caused by a sizeable, yet undeclared nuclear accident. This work presents the most compelling monitoring dataset of this release, comprising 1,100 atmospheric and 200 deposition data points from the Eurasian region.

The data suggest a release from a nuclear reprocessing facility located in the Southern Urals, possibly from the Mayak nuclear complex.

A release from a crashed satellite as well as a release on Romanian territory (despite high activity concentrations) can be excluded. The model age of the radioruthenium supports the hypothesis that fuel was reprocessed ≤2 years after discharge, possibly for the production of a high-specific activity 144Ce source for a neutrino experiment in Italy.

L'étude, publiée vendredi 26 juillet 2019 dans les comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences des États-Unis et relayée par Le Figaro, indique qu'il est possible de supposer que le rejet a eu lieu en Russie, dans la région sud de l'Oural. Il pourrait notamment provenir du site de retraitement nucléaire de Maïak, l'un des plus grands complexes nucléaires du monde.