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Sixth IAEA Mission to Collect Marine Samples from Coastal Waters off Fukushima Prefecture

2016/14
Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Japan from 14 to 18 November 2016 to collect water and fish samples from coastal waters off Fukushima Prefecture to support the quality assurance of radioactivity data collection and analysis by the responsible authorities in Japan.

The mission follows several previous visits by IAEA experts to collect marine samples from around TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (NPS) for interlaboratory comparisons of radioactivity analyses. The team includes two staff from the IAEA’s Environment Laboratories in Monaco.

The series of visits is a follow-up activity to recommendations made on marine monitoring in a report by the 2013 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.

The IAEA’s previous five marine sampling missions have shown that Japan's 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.

IAEA experts gathered seawater samples during previous missions in September and November 2014. In May 2015 and May 2016, they also collected sediment samples. In November 2015, the scope of the data reliability and comparability assessment was further broadened to include fish samples caught by fishermen.

Last update: 20 June 2018

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