Plutonium in Baltic sediments

Marine sediments accumulate the bulk of plutonium produced by nuclear tests. The nuclear power industry will form an additional source of plutonium, and it is important to determine the present background levels of plutonium in sediments and to compare the accumulation rate in the Baltic with that in other areas of the world. Plutonium was determined on four sediment cores collected from the Baltic Sea in 1974 and 1975. Two of the samples were from oxygenated coastal sediment with benthic life and two cores were collected from deep basins in the Baltic at depths of 183 m and 164 m where the bottoms were anoxic, with no benthic life, and where the rate of sedimentation is rather high. Data are presented on the Pu-239,240 content of the sediment cores as is pCi/kg dry wt in the different core sections. The highest plutonium concentrations were found near the surface, at depths of 0 to 8 cm. In all cores the plutonium concentration decreases sharply at a depth of about 6 to 8 cm

A Multi-objective Approach for Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceWireless sensors networks (WSNs) are deployed to collect huge amounts of data from the environment. This produced data has to be delivered through sensor's wireless interface using multi-hop communications toward a sink. The position of the sink impacts the performance of the wireless sensor network regarding delay and energy consumption especially for relaying sensors. Optimizing the data gathering process in multi-hop wireless sensor networks is, therefore, a key issue. This article addresses the problem of data collection using mobile sinks in a WSN. We provide a framework that studies the trade-off between energy consumption and delay of data collection. This framework provides solutions that allow decision makers to optimally design the data collection plan in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks