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By the end of the summer, Japan will map radiation contamination
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Japan's Science Ministry plans to create a special radiation pollution map that will show the level of radioactive elements in the soil released into the atmosphere as a result of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the March earthquake, NHK reported on Thursday.
Data collection will begin in June. Employees of more than 25 universities and research centers will take measurements at more than 2.2 thousand sites. At the same time, as noted in the report, measurements of radionuclide content within a radius of 80 kilometers around the damaged nuclear power plant will be taken every four square kilometers, in the rest of the country - every hundred square kilometers.
Soil samples taken at a depth of five centimeters from the surface will be analyzed.
The map is expected to be released by the end of August.
Following the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11 in Japan, a series of accidents caused by the failure of the cooling system were recorded at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in the northeast of the country. As a result of the incidents, several radiation leaks were detected at the plant, which forced the authorities to evacuate people from a 20-kilometer zone around the plant, impose a ban on people being in the exclusion zone, and also send urgent recommendations to evacuate residents of several areas located within a radius of 30 kilometers or more from the plant.
Later, information began to appear about the discovery of radioactive elements in a number of areas of Japan, in particular, isotopes of iodine and cesium, in the air, sea and drinking water, as well as in food products.
As it became known in May, the first, second and third units of the station had experienced a meltdown of fuel assemblies due to the fact that power outages after the earthquake led to the cessation of the supply of cooling water. According to experts, there is a high probability of a worst-case scenario at all three reactors, according to which the meltdown of the fuel rods led to the so-called "melt-down" phenomenon, when nuclear fuel falls out of the melted rods and accumulates in the lower part of the reactor vessel.
Nuclear power plant operator TEPCO said it expected the situation at the damaged power units to stabilize within about six to nine months, and for radiation levels in the area of the plant to decrease significantly within three months.
Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) announced on April 12 that it had assigned the highest level of danger to the Fukushima-1 accident, level 7. The seventh level of nuclear danger has only been set once before, during the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
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