Gamma emitting fission products in surface sediments of the Ravenglass estuary

The occurrence of some fission products from the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear fuel reprocessing facility has been determined for surface sediments from forty locations in the Ravenglass estuary, North-west England. The influence of the silt-sized fraction in the sediments on the geographic distribution of ¹³⁷Cs is clearly important, and to a lesser extent also influences the distributions of ¹⁰⁶Ru, ${}^{134}\text{Cs}\text{+}{}^{95}\text{Zr}\text{Nb}$ and ¹⁴⁴Ce. The data are compared with recently published results reported by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for a monitoring site in this estuary.