Norway to monitor airborne radioactivity in Svalbard

Similarly, in 1984, a truck carrying unexpectedly radioactive steel rebar took a wrong turn into the entrance of Los Alamos National Laboratory and set off radiation detectors at the gate intended to detect radioactive contamination on workers leaving the site.

This triggered an investigation which traced the contamination to the improper disposal of the active element of a retired medical radiotherapy machine that used cobalt-60 - the radioactive cobalt ended up mixed with a large batch of other scrap metal, contaminating (among other things) ~6,600 tons of rebar, much of which had already been shipped at the time this was discovered...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

> Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard

Not only a mining presence [1]: "After the war, the Soviet Union proposed common Norwegian and Soviet administration and military defence of Svalbard. This was rejected in 1947 by Norway, which two years later joined NATO. The Soviet Union retained high civilian activity on Svalbard, in part to ensure that the archipelago was not used by NATO."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard#Second_World_War

The first anomaly was detected by the Finnish defence forces in Kajaani already the previous day, Sunday evening at 8:40pm local time, but they didn't understand the small deviation was very important and probably suspected it was a minor error in the measurements. Only on Monday at 10am the Nuclear Safety Authority started to investigate properly and published information at 4pm - not early enough to let Forsmark know they wouldn't have needed to evacuate the plant as a precaution.

They did have ways to detect nuclear incidents before then. Vela satellites for example. They seem to have been more tuned for detecting nuclear bombs vs generalized fallout however. Maybe others can speak more towards this.

Maybe they’re expecting more nuclear testing. Or responding to the recent news of the Russian drone attack that hit the Chernobyl containment shield.

They were it was just handled by the Finns prior. The weather station is just changing hands which likely happens on a semi regular basis so this isn’t a new development.

They likely have been, breathing in outside air and measuring radioxenon.

Sweden developed the SAUNA and the US has its ARSA and RASA systems, all of which have been operational since the early 2000s and likely had predecessors before then.

GMC Geiger counters have a usb port, which lets you upload real time data: https://www.gmcmap.com/

I'd guess you still need to maintain them and confirm their accuracy. Tuning a Geiger counter seems more niche then tuning a humidity sensor.

A single sensor is cheap. Thousands and tens of thousands of installations with a dozen sensors, not so much.

Wild mushroom in some parts of Germany are still radioactive to this day exactly because of this. After Chernobyl, clouds with radioactive particles moved west and then started raining over Germany. Certain species of mushroom tend to accumulate the Caesium-137 from that and these mushroom then get eaten by wild animals. To this day if you sell wild animals that were shot in these areas you have to get them tested. They regularly exceed legal contamination levels deemed safe for human consumption.

> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram. [1]

[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.

Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.

It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.

And I vaguely remember an eminent Norwegian professor in the field of radiation said he would buy an extra freezer so he could buy up cheap reindeer meat. The slaughtering was probably unnecessary.