On 20th November the Telegraph reported that French scientists had confirmed that a radioactive cloud had spread over Europe following a nuclear accident in Russia or Kazakhstan. It reported that France’s nuclear safety institute, IRSN, picked up faint traces of ruthenium 106, a radioactive nuclide that is produced when atoms are split in a nuclear reactor and which does not occur naturally, in three of its 40 monitoring stations late September. The French nuclear regulator if an accident of this magnitude had happened in France it would have required the evacuation or sheltering of people in a radius of “a few kilometres around the accident site”. The IRSN has been reporting the incident since October.
http://www.irsn.fr/EN/Pages/Home.aspx