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Fourth IAEA Mission to Collect Marine Samples in Fukushima Prefecture

2015/43
Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

(Photo: mmphotography.it/Flickr)

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Japan from 17 to 20 November 2015 to collect water and fish samples from coastal waters in Fukushima Prefecture to support the quality assurance of radioactivity data collection and analysis by the responsible authorities in Japan.

The mission follows three previous visits by IAEA experts to collect marine samples from around TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (NPS) for inter-laboratory comparisons of radioactivity analyses. They gathered seawater samples during missions in September and November 2014. In May this year, the experts also collected sediment samples.

The team will include two staff from the IAEA’s Environment Laboratories in Monaco.  In addition to collecting seawater near Fukushima Daiichi NPS, the team will collect samples caught by fishermen in the Prefecture to broaden the scope of the data reliability and comparability assessment.

The visit is a follow-up activity to recommendations made on marine monitoring in a report by the IAEA International Peer Review Mission on Mid- and Long-Term Roadmap towards the Decommissioning of TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Units 1-4, which reviewed Japan's efforts to plan and implement the decommissioning of the plant.

Previous sampling missions have shown that Japan's seawater and sediment collection procedures follow the appropriate methodological standards required to obtain representative samples, and that the results reported by the laboratories involved in marine monitoring are reliable.

Last update: 22 Apr 2021

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