Pergelator: Radioactive

Dust filled sky over Lyon France
Reminds me of forest fire season here

Irony as Saharan dust returns radiation from French nuclear tests in the 1960s by Rafael Cereceda

Excerpt:

Dust from the Sahara Desert blown north by strong seasonal winds to France did not only bring stunning light and sunsets - it also carried abnormal levels of radiation.

That's according to French NGO Acro (Association for Control of Radioactivity in the West), which monitors levels of radiation.

The radiation is not considered dangerous for human health but it did arrive in France with a big dollop of irony.

Acro said it comes from nuclear tests carried out by France in the Algerian desert at the beginning of the 1960s, when the North African country was a French overseas territory.

It claims a “boomerang” effect has brought back caesium-137, a product of nuclear fission created in nuclear explosions.

Acro said it did tests on recent Saharan dust that it collected in the area of Jura, near the French border with Switzerland.

“Considering homogeneous deposits in a wide area, based on this analytical result, Acro estimates there was 80,000 bq per km2 of caesium-137,” it said in a statement.

80,000 Bq? What the heck is a Bq? I've never heard of it before, so off to Wikipedia I go.

Henri Becquerel 1852 - 1908

Bq is short for becquerel, a unit of measure for radiation, named after Henri Becquerel , who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903.

One becquerel corresponds to one atomic nucleus decaying in one second. Stable material will decay slowly and have a lower becquerel number, and a larger quantity will have a higher number.

It is kind of an esoteric value. It doesn't tell you how much or what kind of radiation is being produced, which is what you need to know in order to determine how dangerous it is.

"For practical applications, 1 Bq is a small unit. For example, the roughly 0.0169 g of potassium-40 present in a typical human body produces approximately 4,400 disintegrations per second or 4.4 kBq of activity."

So the radiation they detected in France, measured in Bq per square kilometer, is roughly the same amount of radiation produced by 20 normal people. Not very much.

1960 Gerboise Bleue Atom Bomb Test

The Gerboise Bleue was France's first atom bomb test. It produced a blast equivalent to approximately 70 kilotons of TNT, the biggest bomb produced by anyone up to that time. France tested several other atomic bombs in Algeria, but most of those were underground tests. They did set off three more bombs above ground there, but these were small bombs with a yield of only 5 kilotons.