Radioactive Plume from the Three Mile Island Accident: Xenon-133 in Air at a Distance of 375 Kilometers

8 February 1980

journal article
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science

Vol. 207 (4431) , 639-640
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7352276

Abstract

The transit of an air mass containing radioactive gas released from the Three Mile Island reactor was recorded in Albany, New York, by measuring xenon-133. These measurements provide an evaluation of Three Mile Island effluents to distances greater than 100 kilometers. Two independent techniques identified xenon-133 in ambient air at concentrations as high as 3900 picocuries per cubic meter. The local gamma-ray whole-body dose from the passing radioactivity amounted to 0.004 millirem, or 0.004 percent of the annual dose from natural sources.

Keywords

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:

Xenon-133: Ambient Activity from Nuclear Power Stations
Science, 1976
A β-γ coincidence system for environmental ¹³¹
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, 1975