Radiation spike recorded in Severodvinsk; officials point to broken detector

In Severodvinsk, the city in northern Russia that is closest to the location of the country’s August 2019 nuclear accident, another sudden uptick in radiation has been recorded. City officials first told Interfax about the detected result.

“The detector was in the ‘green zone’; that is, within the standard norms from 0.2 to 0.4 microsieverts per hour. 0.3 microsieverts were recorded. This was not strongly in excess of the background signal,” Severodvinsk’s city press service assured the news agency.

No further radiation anomalies were subsequently recorded, and city administrators emphasized that a technical error had caused the detector in question to function incorrectly. They also said no emergency events had taken place in the city’s facilities.