Determination of Characteristic vs Anomalous Cs/Cs Isotopic Ratios in Radioactively Contaminated Environmental Samples.

A contamination with the ubiquitous radioactive fission product Cs cannot be assigned to its source. We used environmental samples with varying contamination levels from various parts of the world to establish their characteristic Cs/Cs isotope ratios and thereby allow their distinction. The samples included biological materials from Chernobyl and Fukushima, historic ashed human lung tissue from the 1960s from Austria, and trinitite from the Trinity Test Site, USA.