Due to an increase of the nuclear power plant, radioactive waste is also increasing trend and due to the large amount of radioactive waste disposal costs also increase. Decontamination of soil contamination is depending on the soil characteristics and environmental factor, so single decontamination method is difficult for effective decontamination. We need innovative method to decontamination, ...

In Korea, there are not detailed analysis data on soil contamination in nuclear power plant(NPP) and suitable treatment criteria of contaminated soils. When the soils of NPP were contaminated, they have been simply collected and kept in radioactive waste building. But contamination of soils in NPP is inevitable and enormous amounts of contaminated soils can be produced during decommissioning. T...

A great amount of radioactive concrete waste was produced from the decontamination and decommissioning of a research reactor and uranium conversion plant at KAERI. To reduce the volume of concrete waste, a separation technology of porous fine cement paste from the gravel and aggregate in concrete through a thermal and mechanical treatment was developed [1]. However, since some gravel and aggreg...

There has been leakage of radioactive materials from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A heavily contaminated area (≥ ¹³⁴,¹³⁷Cs 1000 kBq m⁻²) has been identified in the area northwest of the plant. The majority of the land in the contaminated area is forest. Here we report the amounts of biomass, litter (small organic matter on the surface of the soil), coarse woody litter, and soil in...

On 11 March 2011, the day of the unforgettable disaster of the 9 magnitude Tohoku earthquake and quickly followed by the devastating Tsunami, a damageable amount of radionuclides had dispersed from the Fukushima Daiichi's damaged nuclear reactors. Decontamination of the dispersed radionuclides from seawater and soil, due to the huge amounts of coexisting ions with competitive functionalities, h...

Decontamination and decommissioning (D & D) requires the characterization of large surface areas such as soils, walls, and floors. To address the identification and quantification of radioactive material in these problematic surroundings, a portable high-resolution gamma-spectrometry system has been developed. The system was tested using the calibrated concrete slabs at Grand Junction, Colorado...

Fallout from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident resulted in a 3000-km2 radioactive contamination plume. Here, we model the progressive dilution of the radiocesium contamination in 327 sediment samples from two neighboring catchments with different timing of soil decontamination. Overall, we demonstrate that there has been a ~90% decrease of the contribution of upstream contamin...

BACKGROUND The soil contaminated by depleted uranium (238U) ammunition during the NATO bombing of Serbia and Montenegro was cleaned-up for four months in 2002. A team of 11 clean-up workers (expert members) were medically examined three times: before decontamination as a preliminary medical check-up, immediately after decontamination, and four years after cleaning up contaminated ground. OBJE...