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Updated: Mar 31, 2026

Speciation and Bioavailability Measurements of Environmental Plutonium Using Diffusion in Thin Films
Published on: November 9, 2015
Sources of plutonium in the atmosphere and stratosphere-troposphere mixing
Katsumi Hirose1, Pavel P Povinec2
1Department of Materials and Life Sciences, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.
Abstract:
Plutonium isotopes have primarily been injected to the stratosphere by the atmospheric nuclear weapon tests and the burn-up of the SNAP-9A satellite. Here we show by using published data that the stratospheric plutonium exponentially decreased with apparent residence time of 1.5 ± 0.5 years, and that the temporal variations of plutonium in surface air followed the stratospheric trends until the early 1980s. In the 2000s, plutonium and its isotope ratios in the atmosphere varied dynamically, and sporadic high concentrations of (239,240)Pu reported for the lower stratospheric and upper tropospheric aerosols may be due to environmental events such as the global dust outbreaks and biomass burning.
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