5/30/13

Fukushima - Where is the radioactive water? GEOMAR - Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel

06.07.2012

Fukushima - Where is the radioactive water?

Provide strong eddy mixing in the Pacific 09.07.2012/Kiel. The nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan already gets forgotten again. But large amounts of the released radioactive substances spread remains from the Pacific. Scientists at the GEOMAR | Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have analyzed the long-term spread with the help of a model study. After the strong mixing by oceanic eddy provides for a rapid dilution of the radioactive water. When the foothills reach the North American coast in about three years, the radioactivity should therefore already be below the values that are still to be found as a result of the Chernobyl disaster in the Baltic Sea.

Simulated expansion of the contaminated Wasses the summer of 2012, 16 months after the nuclear disaster. The colors illustrate the dilution relative to the original starting concentration in the Japanese coastal w aters: the highest values (red) are about one-thousandth of the values in April 2011.

By the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March last year, large amounts of radioactive Original text materials were released. A major part of it came through the atmosphere, but also Durch die Reaktorkatastrophe von Fukushima im Mrz letzten Jahres partly by direct introduction into the Pacific Ocean, including long-lived isotopes, wurden groe Mengen radioaktiven Materials freigesetzt. such as the highly soluble in seawater cesium 137th Using detailed computer simulations, researchers have GEOMAR | Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel examined the long-term propagation. "In our models, we have placed great emphasis on a realistic representation of finer details of the flows," said the team leader, Prof. Claus Bning, "because the fabric spread not only through the main flow, the Kuroshio, but mainly by intense and highly variable eddy dominated. " "According to our model calculations should have been already distributed over almost half the North Pacific be through these strong turbulence, the radioactive water," said graduate oceanographer Erik Behrens, lead author of the published in the international journal "Environmental Research Letters" study. "In addition, winter storms have mixed the water to depths of around 500 meters." The associated dilution makes the modeling of a rapid decrease in cesium concentrations. The effect of the wide ocean mixing is particularly evident when one compares the simulated model in the time course of radiation levels in the Pacific with the conditions in the Baltic Sea. "The flowed into the Pacific in March and April 2011 amount of radioactivity was at least three times as large as the one that was registered in 1986 as a result of the Chernobyl disaster in the Baltic," says Bning. "Nevertheless, we simulated radiation levels in the Pacific are already lower than the values that can be found today, 26 years after Chernobyl, in the Baltic Sea." After the simulation model first foothills of the contaminated water should roam the Hawaiian Islands in the fall of 2013 and approximately two to three years later reached the North American coast. Unlike at the sea surface floating debris, which are distributed by the wind, the radioactive water is transported solely by the currents below the sea surface. The other concomitant dilution will significantly slow down but now, since the oceanic eddy in the eastern Pacific are much weaker than in the Kuroshio region. Therefore, the radiation levels in the North Pacific are significantly higher than those before the disaster for years to come. We would be very interested Claus Bning his team to a direct comparison measurements. "Then we could immediately see if we are right even when the absolute values of the concentrations," says Prof. Bning. Such data are for the Kiel scientists but are not currently available.
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Original work: Behrens, E., FU Schwarzkopf, JF Luebbecke and CW Bning, 2012: Model simulations on the long-term dispersal of 137 . Cs released into the Pacific Ocean off Fukushima Environmental Research Letters , 7 , http://dx.doi .org/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034004

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5/30/13

Fukushima - Where is the radioactive water? GEOMAR - Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel

High Resolution Image: Simulated expansion of the contaminated Wasses the summer of 2012 , 16 months after the nuclear disaster. The colors illustrate the dilution relative to the original starting concentration in the Japanese coastal waters: the highest values (red) are about one-thousandth of the values in April 2011. Source: GEOMAR. Animation of the spread of contaminated water . Video sequence of the time course over a period of 10 years after the nuclear disaster. The colors illustrate the dilution relative to the original concentration in the Japanese coastal waters. Source: GEOMAR.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Claus Bning (theory and modeling, GEOMAR), tel 600-4003 0431, cboening@geomar.de January Steffen (GEOMAR, Communications & Media) Tel: 600-2811 0431, jsteffen@geomar.de This press release as pdf .
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