WHOI Releases Study on Lingering Radioactivity Following Pacific Nuclear Bomb Testing

Photo courtesy: Stephanie Murhpy, WHOI

WOODS HOLE – Scientists with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have found lingering radioactivity in the lagoons of remote Marshall Island atolls in the Pacific Ocean where the United States conducted 66 nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s and 1950s.

Radioactivity levels at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls were extensively studied in the decades after the testing ended, but there has been relatively little work conducted there recently.

A team of WHOI scientists reported that levels of radioactive cesium and plutonium have decreased since the 1970s, but also that these elements continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean from seafloor sediments and lagoon waters.

The levels of plutonium are 100 or more times higher in lagoon waters compared to the surrounding Pacific Ocean and about two times higher for a radioactive form of cesium.

Despite these enrichments, they do not exceed U.S. and international water quality standards set to protect human health, the scientists reported yesterday, in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

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