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Criirad final report on Chernobyl Fires – Recommendations and findings

Images satellites NASA / FIRMS /Période du 14 au 15 avril 2020 (4H GMT)

NASA 1 satellite images updated April 15, 2020 at 4:00 GMT (see illustrations) confirm what Ukrainian authorities announced yesterday that the recent rains and the action of firefighters have led to the arrest of the fires which were a few hundred meters from the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. As the satellite image of the region shows, most of the fires that affected the contaminated areas are resolved but some limited foci persist. CRIIRAD will maintain its surveillance.
These fires resulted in a one-time increase of more than 700 times 2 in the concentration of cesium 137 in the air of the city of Kiev located more than 100 kilometers south of the Chernobyl power plant. Of many questions remain about the radiological impact of these fires for firefighters, local residents as well as the safety of nuclear installations and waste storage in the exclusion zone. The recurrence of fires in contaminated areas also raises questions about the means of prevention and management implemented to limit these repeated releases of radioactivity, just like on the absence of air radioactivity control beacons in the most exposed inhabited areas.

See all CRIIRAD press releases on the dedicated page:
http://balises.criirad.org/actuTchernobyl2020.html
Impact on France
With regard to the impact on French territory, as indicated in our press release of April 8, the modeling suggests that air masses from the Chernobyl area may have reached
French territory at the start of last week, but with very low and difficult levels of contamination to measure.
As indicated in our press release of April 14, the analysis of the filter for the radioactivity monitoring beacon atmosphere operated by CRIIRAD in Montélimar (Drôme, Rhône valley) confirmed that over the period from 3 as of April 10, the volume activity of cesium 137 in ambient air remained very low, below the limits of detection (<6 μBq / m 3).
The same observations are made for the Romans-sur-Isère tag (Drôme): the analysis of the aerosol filter that night for the period from April 5 to April 14 (morning) does not show cesium 137 above the limit of detection (<13 μBq / m 3).
This means that the traces of cesium 137 necessarily present in the atmosphere are lower than detection capabilities of the measurement means implemented by CRIIRAD. These detection limits are different for these two analyzes because the Montélimar filter counted the entire weekend, 300,000 seconds, which is not the case for the pre-counting of the Romans filter.
Editing: Bruno Chareyron, nuclear physics engineer, director of the CRIIRAD laboratory, with the participation of Jérémie Motte, head of the beacons service and Stéphane Patrigeon, metrologist technician.

Document source https://balises.criirad.org/pdf/200415_CPCRIIRAD_Radioactivite_incendies_Tchernobyl.pdf

April 15, 2020 - Posted by arclight2011part2 | Uncategorized