RAIN laden with sand from the Sahara desert, which regularly coats cars and buildings across southern Europe with a layer of yellow dust, is spreading radioactive material from the Chernobyl accident 15 years ago.
Clouds of tiny sand grains are sucked high up into the atmosphere during periods of low pressure over the desert. They are blown over Europe and then washed out by the rain. Scientists from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, sampled the sand that fell in the city in April last year. They found that it contained 26.6 becquerels of caesium-137 per kilogram, which could only have come from the explosion at Chernobyl.
The researchers did the same experiment in 1988, when contamination from Chernobyl was 40 times as high, suggesting that concentrations in the environment are halving every 2.3 years. The radiation emitted by the caesium-137 is now only a fraction of that from naturally occurring ...
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