Current 129I concentration levels from the western Black Sea through the Bosporus to the northeastern agean Sea

Abstract

The level of 129I concentrations in various areas can provide us important information about licit and illicit nuclear activities, or possible environmental nuclear contamination in an incipient and harmless phase. It can be used as a long-term tracer for nuclear pollution if the initial concentration of 129I is known in the investigated geographical region.In this paper we continued our work to determine 129I concentration in water samples from western Black Sea between 2017 and 2022 to establish the level of 129I and whether this changed in time. The average value of 129I concentration obtained is (1.24 ± 0.03) × 108 atoms/L.In this study, the concentrations of 129I determined in waters collected from several points in the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits were found to have values close to those obtained for the Black Sea but slightly lower values were observed in the Aegean Sea water.These AMS studies help to discover the outspread of pollution from sources outside Eastern Europe but also from new unknown sources that may appear in the new geo-political context.