Seven years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, French scientists have found radioactive fallout beneath 66 feet of snow atop Europe's highest mountain, they said Wednesday.
They also said it would take decades still before the traces of radioactivity from Chernobyl disap-pear.Researchers found traces of Caesium 137 from the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, which caught fire and melted down in April 1986, in samples of snow taken last week near the top of the 15,770 foot Mont Blanc in the French Alps.
Jean-Francis Penglot of the National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble said the intensity of the radioactivity was only marginally lower than the 10 becquerels per 2.2 pounds of snow registered just after the Chernobyl explosion.
A becquerel is the unit for measuring radioactive decay, equal to the number of atoms that disintegrate per second, and named after the French physicist who discovered radioactivity in uranium.
The danger level is 1,000 times higher.
Radioactive fallout below the snow line had long been washed off by rain to rivers, Penglot said. But it would take much longer for fallout caught in the snow to slide down the mountains along slow-flowing glaciers.