116
previously.

This is due to the large concentration gradients exhibited by

some radionuclides "within the Bravo Crater” and at “mid-Jagoon" which were
reported as the collection sites for the previous collections.

If mid-lagoon

is taken as Station B-25, the concentrations of 65 and 2078; found in this
work, and decay corrected to 1964, are well within the range of concentrations
measured by Welander (1967) in 1964.

The concentration of

137 Cs measured in

this work, corrected for decay to 1964, however, is 100% higher than the upper
range of 13764 concentrations reported by Welander; this could indicate that
transport of

137

Cs may be occurring from higher concentration regions upstream.

In the Bravo Crater (using the concentrations measured in surface sediments at

Station C-3) the concentrations of 137¢6 (decay corrected), 2394240 Pu and
23854 are lower hy 34%, 18% and 24%, respectively, than those measured in
samples collected in 1969 by Held (1971); this indicates that radionuclides
may be leaving this area.

Some care should be exercised in the application of

these figures, however, because of the uncertainty in the collection sites and
the possible differences in sample collection techniques.

With respect to (3) above, some date (Nevissi and Schell, 1974; Schell,
1974a; Noshkin et al., 1974; Lowman, 1973) are presently available on the
concentration of radionuclides in the waters of Bikini Atoll Lagoon. Although
water samples were not collected at each of the sediment sampling stations
reported herein, the numher of water samples collected are large and the interpretation of the water data encompasses a tremendous (and uncompleted) task.
Such a treatment is outside of the scope of this work.

However, in line with

the interpretation of the radionuclide distributions in the sediments, the
ratios of the radionuclides measured in bottom water and surface sediments

were computed aS a measure of the possible differences between the fractionation of radionuclides between the sedimentary (source) and aqueous phases.

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