"What have I done to you? I'm a good one!" Ruthenium responds to radiation-related panic in Russia earlier this autumn. Source: Facebook. In early October, information about a leak of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 into the atmosphere appeared in western media. Germany’s radiation watchdog announced that the source of the leak was most probably in the southern Urals, and French experts confirmed that conclusion.
Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom, however, denied the claim, saying that according to Roshydromet, the country’s environmental monitoring body, tests for particulate pollutants carried out between 25 September and 7 October failed to find any traces of Ruthenium, apart from a single instance in St Petersburg.
However, at the end of November, Greenpeace Russia received a response to a query it had sent Rosgidromet. This confirmed the discovery of ruthenium-106 in late September in the Chelyabinsk region, just to the east of the Ural mountains. The element was detected near the Mayak complex, a facility for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. Ruthenium was also found in the atmospheres of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and the Krasnodar, Volgograd, and St Petersburg regions.
