Atmospheric Dispersal of ¹²⁹Iodine from Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facilities

Abstract

129 I/ 127 I ratios measured in meteoric water and epiphytes from the continental United States are higher than those measured in coastal seawater or surface freshwater and suggest long-range atmospheric transport of 129 I from the main source for the earth's surface inventory, viz., nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities. The median ratio for 14 meteoric water samples is 2100 × 10 -12 , corresponding to a 129 I concentration of 2.5 × 10 7 atoms/L, whereas 9 epiphyte samples have a median ratio of 1800 × 10 -12 . Calculated deposition rates of 129 I in the continental United States reveal that a small but significant fraction of the atmospheric releases from the nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities at Sellafield, England, and Cap de La Hague, France, is deposited after distribution by long-range transport. The inferred dominant mode of transport is easterly, within the troposphere, mainly in the form of the organic gas methyl iodide.

A review on speciation of iodine-129 in the environmental and biological samples

“…It was reported that iodate is the dominant specie of iodine in soil solution under non-flooded oxidizing soil condition (85%), while under the flooded condition (anoxic); the dominant specie is iodide [78]. in terrestrial environment due to the nuclear weapons testing [26,35,77,[84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91].…”

Iodine-129 concentration in seawater near Fukushima before and after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

“…These concentrations correspond to the locations of nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, which is a primary source of 129 I in the environment. Since major reprocessing plants such as Sellafield (54 • 00 N) in the United Kingdom, La Hague (49 • 30 N) in France, and Hanford (46 • 37 N) in the United States are located in the middle-to high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, 129 I originating from nuclear fuel reprocessing plants was mainly distributed over the Northern Hemisphere (Snyder et al, 2010;Suzuki et al, 2010;Moran et al, 1999). The latitudinal distribution of 129 I in surface seawater before the 1FNPP accident is attributed to the atmospheric deposition of 129 I originating from the major reprocessing plants and can be expressed as a linear function of latitude (Fig.…”

Iodine monoxide in the Antarctic snowpack

“…For TSI analysis, samples were allowed to warm to room temperature and, after addition of 187 Re as an internal standard, were measured by a Perkin Elmer Elan 6100 inductively coupled mass spectrometer (ICP-MS), peaking hopping on the masses 127 I and 79 Br. This method has been used for iodine and bromine quantification in snow and rain samples from mid-latitude sites by Gilfedder et al (2007a,b) and Gilfedder et al (2008) and similar methods have been used by Moran et al (1999) for rain in the United Sates. Replicate measurements of selected samples ranged from 0.8-13%, except when approaching the detection limit (3σ = 30 ng/l), where the relative standard deviation could be as high as 20-30%.…”