Effects of the Chernobyl disaster Other Report on Chernobyl"). The 2006 TORCH report claimed that: In terms of their surface areas, Belarus (22% of its land area) and Austria (13%) were most affected by higher levels of contamination. Other countries were seriously affected; for example, more than 5% of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden were contaminated to high levels (> 40,000 Bq/m caesium-137). More than 80% of Moldova, the European part of Turkey, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria and the Slovak Republic were contaminated to lower levels (> 4,000 Bq/m caesium-137). And 44% of Germany and 34% of the UK were similarly affected. (See map of radioactive distribution
Isotopes of caesium not produced by nuclear weapons because Cs is created by beta decay of original fission products only long after the nuclear explosion is over. Cs also captures neutrons with a cross section of 13.00 barns, becoming medium-lived radioactive Cs. Caesium-136 undergoes beta decay (β−), producing Ba-136 directly. Caesium-137, with a half-life of 30.17 years, is one of the two principal medium-lived fission products, along with Sr, which are responsible for most of the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel after several years of cooling, up to several hundred years after use. It constitutes most of the radioactivity still left from the