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
Caesium which could create wide-ranging contamination, gradually put some of these caesium sources out of use. Caesium-137 has been employed in a variety of industrial measurement gauges, including moisture, density, levelling, and thickness gauges. It has also been used in well logging devices for measuring the electron density of the rock formations, which is analogous to the bulk density of the formations. Caesium-137 has been used in hydrologic studies analogous to those with tritium. As a daughter product of fission bomb testing from the 1950s through the mid-1980s, caesium-137 was released into the atmosphere, where it was absorbed readily into solution.