Long term decrease of 137Cs bioavailability in French pastures: results from 25 years of monitoring

Khaled Brimo (1) , Marc Andre Gonze (1) , Laurent Pourcelot (1)

1 IRSN/PSE-ENV/SEREN/LEREN - Laboratoire d'étude et d'expertise sur la radioactivité de l'environnement

Long term radioactivity monitoring programs contribute to the understanding of the behavior of radionuclides in the environment. This work aims to investigate the long term behavior of Cesium-137 in pasture ecosystem (root soil, grass and cow’s milk) by using of more than twenty five years monitoring data collected at ten of French pasture sites contaminated by atmospheric fallouts from Chernobyl and nuclear atmospheric tests. We estimated with a simple exponential model the long term effective half-lives of radiocesium in root soil, grass vegetation and cow‘s milk along with their associated uncertainties. The average values of the effective half-lives over all the investigated sites were determined as 17, 11 and 9 years for soil, grass and milk respectively. Those values compare favorably to those estimated in previous studies in literature. These findings further enable us to quantify the decrease of 137Cs bioavailability which ranges from 0.008 to 0.044 year-1 (i.e. effective half lives ranging from 16 to 87 years in soil)

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement

Khaled Brimo, Marc Andre Gonze, Laurent Pourcelot. Long term decrease of 137Cs bioavailability in French pastures: results from 25 years of monitoring. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 2019, 208-209, pp.106029. ⟨10.1016/j.jenvrad.2019.106029⟩. ⟨hal-02454921⟩