It's interesting to note how the West discovered there had been a nuclear accident in the USSR when Chernobyl exploded. The Forsmark reactor in Sweden detected the fallout on the clothing of workers returning to the plant after lunch, IIRC.
Surprised this station seems to post-date that? Seems like it would have been handy to have in the Cold War. Then again, Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard so maybe that has something to do with it.
Similarly, in 1984, a truck carrying unexpectedly radioactive steel rebar took a wrong turn into the entrance of Los Alamos National Laboratory and set off radiation detectors at the gate intended to detect radioactive contamination on workers leaving the site.
This triggered an investigation which traced the contamination to the improper disposal of the active element of a retired medical radiotherapy machine that used cobalt-60 - the radioactive cobalt ended up mixed with a large batch of other scrap metal, contaminating (among other things) ~6,600 tons of rebar, much of which had already been shipped at the time this was discovered...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
Reminded me of this unfortunate incident. The answer to "How much contamination can a radiotherapy machine cause?" is unfortunately quite a bit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
> Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard
Not only a mining presence [1]: "After the war, the Soviet Union proposed common Norwegian and Soviet administration and military defence of Svalbard. This was rejected in 1947 by Norway, which two years later joined NATO. The Soviet Union retained high civilian activity on Svalbard, in part to ensure that the archipelago was not used by NATO."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard#Second_World_War
Wouldn't "high civilian activity" refer primarily to miners?
Probably. Barentsburg, west from Longyearbyen, is predominantly a Russian mining village. Svalbard is interesting in that it is part of Norway but citizens of some other countries are granted more rights than they’d have in the rest of Norway, and Norway also is not allowed to operate its military from Svalbard.
I believe it's basically all countries. There was a deal with other countries through the UN.
48. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty
In practice it's a visa-free zone. Anyone from anywhere can settle in Svalbard as long as they can get there. Of course, not many want to, so it's a bit academic.
There's was/is also Pyramiden to the north east, also a mining town but closed down in '98
The first anomaly was detected by the Finnish defence forces in Kajaani already the previous day, Sunday evening at 8:40pm local time, but they didn't understand the small deviation was very important and probably suspected it was a minor error in the measurements. Only on Monday at 10am the Nuclear Safety Authority started to investigate properly and published information at 4pm - not early enough to let Forsmark know they wouldn't have needed to evacuate the plant as a precaution.
They did have ways to detect nuclear incidents before then. Vela satellites for example. They seem to have been more tuned for detecting nuclear bombs vs generalized fallout however. Maybe others can speak more towards this.
The last of the Vela satellites were shut down in 1984 or 1985 (I've found conflicting sources on this) but in any case, before Chernobyl (April, 1986). They were replaced by other systems of course but as others have pointed out, those were never designed to detect fallout. Bhangmeters look for a characteristic double-flash of light from atmospheric nuclear detonations.
Yeah, the Vela sats could spot nuclear detonations, but didn't sniff for trace isotopes or anything like that. They were in way too high an orbit for any traces to make it to them anyhow.
The bhangmeters on Vela satellites were to detect atmospheric detonations: they exploit some odd optical characteristics of the fireball.
They did have gamma, neutron, and X-ray detectors too but I’d guess those were also tuned to detect detonations rather than small background changes. That might not be feasible from so high up and it would square with the Velas’ role in discovering gamma-ray bursts.
Maybe they’re expecting more nuclear testing. Or responding to the recent news of the Russian drone attack that hit the Chernobyl containment shield.