55 23924U 

 7) mussels we have found ratios of Fe to ' Pu in 



the 30 to 50 range, significantly different from the value 

 close to 100 reported here. Too little comparison data is 

 available concerning 55Fe in nearby mussels for us to be 

 perfectly sure of this situation. Inspection of the lower 

 half of Table 11, as was discussed above for Table 7, 

 clearly shows that the neighborhood near Maine Yankee re- 

 actor is not characterized by radionuclide contamination 

 of mussel sampl es . 



In Table 12 we have set out the data from another experi- 

 ment, prompted by the reports of Noshkin et al (1971), of 

 Fowler et al (1975), and Beasley and Fowler (1976a, 1976b) 

 that nereid worms took up substantial portions of Pu either 

 from water or from a variety of types of contaminated sedi- 

 ments. A commercial worm collector obtained for us a large 

 sample of sandworms from the mud-flat just north of the 

 Maine Yankee effluent diffuser, and another sample from a 

 similar mud-flat, contaminated only by fallout, near 

 Portland, ME. At each location he also scooped a sample 

 of mud. About half of each worm sample he preserved for 

 us in formalin, and the other half he induced, by methods 

 he was not willing to describe, to purge their guts of 

 contained mud before being preserved. The worms, and the 

 sediments, were analyzed by our usual procedures. 



137 

 The Wiscasset worms contained elevated levels of Cs and 



of Pu; whole worms contained 137cs at a concentration about 

 lOXand Pu about 22.7% that (estimated ) in the wet sedi- 

 ment from which they were collected. Cleaning reduced the 

 137CS in worms to 24% and the Pu to 7.7% of the uncleaned 

 value. There was some reduction in the dry weight fraction 

 of worm tissue during the cleaning process, so it is possi- 

 ble that not all the loss of radionuclides was due, simply, 

 to evacuation of gut content, but we have little doubt this 

 was the chief process. The whole worms from Portland con- 

 tained much higher percentages of sediment tracer: 49% of 

 137CS, and 53% of Pu; also, of these concentrations higher 

 fractions were in the tissues: 42% of 137cs and 19.3% of 

 Pu. Another indication that the nuclides from the fallout- 

 contaminated situation were somewhat different, chemically, 

 than those from the reactor-contaminated situation came 

 from the formal i n-sol ubi 1 i zation data shown at the bottom 

 of Table 12: The latter situation produced worms with only 

 2/3 of tissue 137cs, but 18% of tissue Pu, soluble in forma- 

 lin, whereas the fallout contaminated worms showed all 

 their tissue 137cs, but only 12% of their tissue Pu soluble 



29 



