Results of environmental radiation monitoring at the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories, JAEA, following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident

Takeyasu, Masanori ; Nakano, Masanao ; Fujita, Hiroki; Nakada, Akira ; Watanabe, Hitoshi; Sumiya, Shuichi ; Furuta, Sadaaki

As a response to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, emergency environmental radiation monitoring was performed at the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). This paper provisionally describes the results of the monitoring including ambient radiation dose rate and radioactivity concentrations in airborne and fallout. The ambient radiation dose rate began to increase since about 1:00 on March 15 2011, and varied with three peak dose rate of several thousand Gy/h at 8:00 on March 15, at 5:00 on March 16, and at 4:00 on March 21. The variation over time in radioactivity concentrations in airborne and fallout almost showed the same tendency as that of the dose rate. The fallout of Cs for 1 month from March 15 to April 15 was about 120 times higher than that in May 1986 after the Chernobyl accident. The internal dose by inhalation was estimated from the airborne concentration observed.