In what reads somewhat like a convoluted detective story, the events unfolding at the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) in Ukraine during late February had the media channels lighting up with chatter about ‘elevated gamma radiation levels’, which showed up on the public CEZ radiation monitoring dashboard for a handful of gamma radiation sensors. This happened right before this reporting system went off-line, leaving outside observers guessing at what was going on. By the time occupying forces had been driven out of the CEZ, the gamma radiation levels were reported as being similar to before the invasion, yet the computer hardware which was part of the monitoring system had vanished along with the occupying forces. After considering many explanations, this left security researchers like [Ruben Santamarta] to consider that the high values had been spoofed.
During the Black Hat event held in August of 2023, [Ruben] presented his reasoning in a series of slides. Much of this comes down to applying Occam’s Razor. The original theory was that driving heavy vehicles around the CEZ caused radioactive dust to get suspended (resuspension) into the air, causing the ten-fold jump in gamma radiation readings, yet as demonstrated by M.D. Wood and colleagues in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity in September 2023, this is physically impossible, as disturbing even the top 10 cm of soil in which the 137Cs isotope is concentrated would not have a meaningful difference in gamma reading. A fact which is also demonstrated with the regular wildfires in the CEZ that cause massive resuspension of 137Cs-containing soil, yet which do not lead to massive gamma radiation spikes. Measurements afterwards by the ..
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