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Zemlya test site. Global fallout from testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 

 fifties and sixties are still the main source to radioactive contamination of Nordic regions 

 although it in certain areas in Scandinavia is overruled by the contamination from the 

 Chernobyl accident in 1986. (UNSCEAR. 1982 and 1988). 



The amount of local fallout from the Novaya Zemlya test site is not reported. It seems 

 however, that the Arctic Ocean (Fig. 1) contains about 4 times more '''Cs, '"Sr and ^' 

 ^^'Pu than we would expect from global fallout (IAEA, 1988). Hence it is tempting to 

 assume a contribution from local fallout. However it has also been suggested that the 

 Siberian river systems, which in the forties and early flfties were used for disposal of high 

 level radwaste from the USSR nuclear weapons programme (Cochran et al, 1990) may 

 be a source of input of radioactivity to the Arctic Ocean. 



Discharges of especially ''^Cs from the BNFL reprocessing plant Sellafield in the UK in 

 the seventies and early eighties contributed significantly to the North Atlantic inventories 

 (Fig. 2). 



The Arctic regions have been contaminated locally from various sources e.g. with 1 TBq 

 ^•^Pu at Thule (Aarkrog 1984b) from the B-52 crash in 1968, with shonlived fission 

 products (e.g. '*Zr) in northern Canada from the loss of the Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite 

 in 1978 (Tracy et al, 1984) and with "'I from loss of nuclear submarines e.g. the 

 Komsomolets submarine in the Norwegian Sea in 1989. (Fig. 3). Among these local 

 sources only the Thule contamination has so far been of longterm radioecological 

 interest. 



Zolotkov (1992) has recently reported that radwaste throughout the years has been 

 dumped along the east coast of Novaya Zemlya. The waste has also included nuclear 

 shipreactors, some still containing their nuclear fuel elements. 



Special radionuclides in the Arctic 



The long environmental halflife of radionuclides deposited on moss and lichen in Arctic 

 regions has made it possible to reveal the presence of some radionuclides normally not 



