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ST: Strahlen- und Medizinphysik

ST 10: Poster

ST 10.3: Poster

Tuesday, March 14, 2006, 16:00–16:30, C

Chernobyl Impact on the Middle East — •Ahmed Qwasmeh and Helmut Fischer — IUP- Institute for Environmental Physics, Landesmessstelle für Radioaktivität Bremen University, Germany

As a consequence of nuclear probes and nuclear accidents (the largest one was Chernobyl at 1986) an amount of about 85 PBq of Cs-137 was ejected into the atmosphere from where it was deposited on the soil. After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, large-scale contamination occurred in Europe and some other parts of the northern hemisphere. Whilst deposition and radioecological behaviour of the Chernobyl fallout is quite well documented in central and eastern Europe, information about the middle east, though affected as well, is scarce. Some research has been done and published about artificial radioactivity in Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In order to obtain more detailed information, we brought two sets of soil samples from Jordan, the first in April 2004 and the second in July 2005. The first set has been analyzed and the second set analysis is still in progress. In this contribution we will compare the impact of Chernobyl on these three countries and investigate the correlation of Cs-137 concentrations in soil with the amount of rainfall and altitudes of the sampling sites. The depth distribution of Cs-137 in soil will be analyzed and, with additional information from Sr-90 data, the contributions from global and Chernobyl fallout will be discriminated.