Mystery as radioactive uranium is detected floating above Alaska… But where the particle came from is unknown

4

On August 3, 2016, seven kilometers above Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something MYSTERIOUS: an atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of URANIUM used in NUCLEAR FUELS and BOMBS. It’s the FIRST TIME scientists have detected such a particle just floating along in the atmosphere in 20 YEARS of plane-based observations.

radioactive uranium alaska mystery, mystery as radioactive uranium detected over Alaska, uranium detected over alaska, alaska urianium, mysterious radioactive uranium floats over alaska, radioactive uranium alaska
mystery as radioactive uranium detected over Alaska

Uranium is the heaviest element to occur naturally on Earth’s surface in an appreciable amount. Normally it occurs as the slightly radioactive isotope uranium-238, but some amount of uranium-235, the kind humans make bombs and fuel out of, occurs in nature. Uranium-238 is already rare to find floating above the Earth in the atmosphere. But scientists have never before spotted enriched uranium, a sample uranium containing uranium-235, in millions of research plane-captured atmospheric particles.

One of the main motivations of this paper is to see if someobody who knows more about uranium than any of us would understand the source of the particle,” explains scientist Dan Murphy from NOAA. After all, “aerosol particles containing uranium enriched in uranium-235 are definitely not from a natural source,” he writes in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

Murphy has led flights around the world sampling the atmosphere for aerosols. These tiny particles can come from polution, dust, fires, and other sources, and can influence things like cloud formation and the weather. The researchers spotted the mystery particle on a flight over Alaska using their “Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry” instrument. They considered that perhaps the signature came from something weird, but evidence seems to point directly at enriched uranium.

They were not intending to look for radioactive elements. “The purpose of the field campaign was to obtain some of the first global cross-sections of the concentration of trace gases and of dust, smoke, and other particles in the remote troposphere over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans,” according to the paper.

But where the particle came from is a mystery

It’s pretty clear it came from recently made reactor-grade uranium, the authors write (aka, not from Fukushima or Chernobyl). Perhaps from burnt fuel contaminated with uranium, they thought. They tried to trace it to a source using the direction of the wind -but their best estimate pointed vaguely to Asia. Higher probability areas include some parts of China, including its border with North Korea, and parts of Japan.

You don’t need to worry about atmospheric radiation from just one particle, though. “It’s not a significant amount of radioactive debris by itself. But it’s the implication that there’s some very small source of uranium that we don’t understand.

One author, Thomas Ryerson from NOAA, is hoping that someone in a field that’s not intimately associated with atmospheric chemistry can say ‘a-ha!’ and give them a call.

I doubt! By the way, Alaska will also have a mercury problem soon!

Follow us: Facebook and Twitter

Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, Gizmodo

4 Comments

  1. With the sudden spike in earthquakes up in Alaska it is not a surprise the wastes from our nuclear dumping is thawing out with the Mercury melting and liquefying and now the uranium is floating up and out in the atmosphere. Its beginning to look like our parents used Alaska as our waste refrigerator for the ingredients we used in OUR own nuclear weapons. Rather then looking quite dumb lets clean it up before more heat escapes from the ground opening up and all the daily earthquake swarms which are releasing heat that is beginning to melt the ice up there. Isn’t this part of the ring of fire so that would be volcanic heat and this means any wastes in the area will melt quickly and be spread quickly! So, lets stop pointing a finger and realize we did it, its what we used and clean it up!

Leave a reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.