Radiation

On Thursday, a 'serious' nuclear radiation leak was detected in a Finish Olkiluoto 2 power plant which led to an automatic shutdown of the plant. No radiation espaced the facility though. Tomi Routamo, deputy director at the nuclear safety authority STUK, said there was “no danger to people or the environment.”

Finland’s Minister of Social Affairs and Health Aino-Kaisa Pekonen said: “This is a significant and an exceptional incident and we consider it important to spread correct information about it.”

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization has detected slightly increased levels of isotopes produced by nuclear fission near the Baltic Sea. The CTBTO is a network of hundreds of monitoring stations checking for nuclear weapon tests worldwide but is also able to identify other nuclear activities. One CTBTO station detected higher-than-usual levels of the radionuclides caesium-134, caesium-137 and ruthenium-103 earlier this week that are "certainly nuclear fission products, most likely from a civil source," but "it’s outside the CTBTO’s mandate to identify the exact origin," so a spokesperson of the Vienna-based CTBTO.

Nuclear fission products are atomic fragments that are left after an atom is split into two or more smaller nuclei and are radioactive.

Following a forest fire in the restricted zone around Chernobyl, a spike of radiation has been reported by the Ukrainian state ecological inspection service. To combat the fire the government has mobilized around 100 firefighters and uses planes and a helicopter. The emergency service has said that no increase in radiation in the air has been detected, no people are in danger and that the fire was not visibly burning on Sunday morning.