Beach sand, Vromos bay (Bulgaria)
Posted: 15 Sep 2019, 07:58
Recently, a very good and helpful guy provided me a sample of beach sand from Vromos bay, Black Sea. It is located about 13km away from the regional center of Burgas, between the Atia NATO navy base and Chernomorets village. Now that's an interesting place, I've personally never been there, but I've seen it from the panoramic road. It is a little-known fact even in Bulgaria that the sand there is radioactive. The reason is anthropogenic, but it has nothing to do with uranium mining or Chernobyl fallout. Looking for "Vromos bay" in google will give lots of "radiation"-related articles, but mysteriously for some reason it's not well known here.
It all started in the 60s, this was the communist era and as you can imagine, the ecological standards weren't set very strict at that time. A copper mine was opened nearby. The floatation material from the mine was dumped right on the beach. At that time, tourism was still underdeveloped and people from the nearby village of Chernomorets were mostly engaged in fishery and agriculture. They were excavating chalcopyrite from the mine. Material from the mine was dumped into the bay in large quantities and thus, a strip almost 150m wide was "reclaimed" from the sea. In the 1970s though, an USSR-Bulgarian team of scientists doing research on radioactivity in the area were rather surprised to find out that the background in the Vromos bay was anomalously high. Turned out together with the copper ore, there were also quite a lot of uranium-bearing minerals. At that point it was too late though, the bay was heavily contaminated. Subsequently the mine got closed. In the 1990s a company was contracted to clean up the site. What they did is drag most of the mine material from the bay and sink it in deeper sea. While this helped a lot, at that point, the sands were already contaminated.
Nowadays, the sands are still contaminated with NORM stuff, despite the cleanup efforts. The beach is closed...well it's definitely not fenced, a sign like this warns tourists to avoid it since it has elevated levels of radionuclides:
Yeahyeah it's the same dreadful "ВНИМАНИЕ" word that Chernobyl fans probably know at least from the trailers, for some reason that word is the same in Russian and Bulgarian, means just "warning" :)
Of course, foreign tourists can't read that. Well, Bulgarians apparently don't give a shit either and there are often people sunbathing there. According to some news articles, there are still hotspots where measured radioactivity is up to 50 times the normal background. However, at most parts it's like 2 to 3 times above. The sand sample that I have - or at least about 100g of it - shows just about 11 CPS (125 CPS being the normal background in the room and 25 CPS being the normal background in my poor lead castle.
The spectrum (about 12h measurement with background extraction) gives out some nice Uranium products photopeaks...
The Vromos bay area is actually a very nice place if we ignore the uranium in the sands:
The sad part though that I didn't know is that back in 60s and 70s, many houses in the nearby village of Chernomorets were built using cobbles and sand from the bay area as construction material. Those probably have high radon levels nowadays...not good definitely....There are also clam farms in the bay as seen by the person that gave me the sample. Not nice, definitely.
It all started in the 60s, this was the communist era and as you can imagine, the ecological standards weren't set very strict at that time. A copper mine was opened nearby. The floatation material from the mine was dumped right on the beach. At that time, tourism was still underdeveloped and people from the nearby village of Chernomorets were mostly engaged in fishery and agriculture. They were excavating chalcopyrite from the mine. Material from the mine was dumped into the bay in large quantities and thus, a strip almost 150m wide was "reclaimed" from the sea. In the 1970s though, an USSR-Bulgarian team of scientists doing research on radioactivity in the area were rather surprised to find out that the background in the Vromos bay was anomalously high. Turned out together with the copper ore, there were also quite a lot of uranium-bearing minerals. At that point it was too late though, the bay was heavily contaminated. Subsequently the mine got closed. In the 1990s a company was contracted to clean up the site. What they did is drag most of the mine material from the bay and sink it in deeper sea. While this helped a lot, at that point, the sands were already contaminated.
Nowadays, the sands are still contaminated with NORM stuff, despite the cleanup efforts. The beach is closed...well it's definitely not fenced, a sign like this warns tourists to avoid it since it has elevated levels of radionuclides:
Yeahyeah it's the same dreadful "ВНИМАНИЕ" word that Chernobyl fans probably know at least from the trailers, for some reason that word is the same in Russian and Bulgarian, means just "warning" :)
Of course, foreign tourists can't read that. Well, Bulgarians apparently don't give a shit either and there are often people sunbathing there. According to some news articles, there are still hotspots where measured radioactivity is up to 50 times the normal background. However, at most parts it's like 2 to 3 times above. The sand sample that I have - or at least about 100g of it - shows just about 11 CPS (125 CPS being the normal background in the room and 25 CPS being the normal background in my poor lead castle.
The spectrum (about 12h measurement with background extraction) gives out some nice Uranium products photopeaks...
The Vromos bay area is actually a very nice place if we ignore the uranium in the sands:
The sad part though that I didn't know is that back in 60s and 70s, many houses in the nearby village of Chernomorets were built using cobbles and sand from the bay area as construction material. Those probably have high radon levels nowadays...not good definitely....There are also clam farms in the bay as seen by the person that gave me the sample. Not nice, definitely.