Europe Radiation Up; Soviets Suspected

West Germany on Tuesday asked Moscow for an explanation of increased radiation levels detected last month, which scientists have tentatively linked to a minor nuclear reactor mishap in the Soviet Union.

West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and France confirmed Tuesday that varying increases in atmospheric radiation were recorded in March but reported no damage or injuries. Kremlin officials denied that the Soviet Union was the source.

Western officials stressed that the elevated airborne radiation levels posed no danger to human health because they were so minuscule.

Officials in Bonn said unusual levels of the radioactive element iodine 131 and four to five times the normal amounts of xenon gas were measured in West Germany between March 9 and 15.

“The experts are all saying it was almost certainly a nuclear power accident,” Heinz-Joerg Haury, a spokesman for the government-financed Institute for Radioactivity and Environmental Research in Munich, told the Associated Press.

In Moscow, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said: “No discharge of radioactive emission was registered on the territory of the Soviet Union.”

“The system of radiometric control stations existing in the Soviet Union is functioning normally,” he said. “Recently it has not registered any discharge of radioactive substances in the Soviet territory. Therefore, if there is an increase in the radioactive level somewhere, its source is not in the Soviet territory but in some other place.”

The world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster occurred in the Soviet Union on April 26 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev. An explosion and fire at the plant in the Soviet Ukraine killed at least 31 people, forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people and contaminated food in Europe. But Soviet officials only acknowledged the accident two days later after Scandinavian governments reported detection of non-lethal radioactive material.

Report Blames Reactor Mishap

The West German Environmental Ministry requested an official Soviet explanation of the higher radiation levels detected in March, ministry representative Claudia Conrad said.

Conrad said that the request being sent to the Kremlin included a copy of a West German scientific report on the radiation incident.

She said the report, which concluded that the elevated radiation levels came from “a mild reactor accident” in the Soviet Union, had been ordered by the ministry immediately after the airborne radioactivity was measured.

Manfred Petzoll, a spokesman for the West German nuclear industry’s trade association, said the report left little doubt the Soviet Union should provide an explanation.

“If they say there was no reactor accident, then they have to give another reason,” Petzoll said.

Sweden recorded abnormal radioactivity between March 11 and 13 and traced it to an area near the Gulf of Finland, southeast of the Soviet city of Leningrad. France recorded small increases in iodine 131 and xenon gas March 9-15.

In Switzerland, elevated radiation levels were measured on March 14 for six hours only. Norwegian officials said radioactivity levels increased slightly in March.

The prevailing winds during the period indicated a radiation source far to the east of West Germany, Austria, Finland and Sweden, the report said.

The unexplained radiation vanished abruptly when the European weather pattern changed on March 15, bringing westerly winds.

Tommy Godaas, chief inspector of the Swedish National Radiation Protection Agency, said, “Considering the small amounts, an accidental minor reactor leak was possible, but it might as well have been a deliberately increased emission while cleaning a reactor.”

Swedish and Norwegian authorities described the iodine emissions as only one-millionth of those of the Chernobyl catastrophe.