Radionuclides assessment for the Romanian black sea shelf

Abstract

Radionuclides within the environment are not always a point of concern, in some cases they can be used to trace and identify incidents even long after they occurred. This reports performs a high resolution spectrometry analyses for several samples taken from the Black Sea containing seawater and sediments. The results give us the opportunity to use traceable radionuclides like137Cs or40K as tracers for the human activities within the western Black Sea area. Although the presence of such radioisotopes can be related to the Chernobyl event, results can be differentiated using other radioisotopes associated to the same event but having a specific timespan since them as the case for241Am. Using such tracers one can isolate events from 30 years ago from the more recent ones.