Lightweight aerial vehicles for monitoring, assessment and mapping of radiation anomalies

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (FDNPP) incident released a significant mass of radioactive material into the atmosphere. An estimated 22% of this material fell out over land following the incident. Immediately following the disaster, there was a severe lack of information not only pertain...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of environmental radioactivity 2014-10, Vol.136, p.127-130
Main Authors: MacFarlane, J.W., Payton, O.D., Keatley, A.C., Scott, G.P.T., Pullin, H., Crane, R.A., Smilion, M., Popescu, I., Curlea, V., Scott, T.B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerials
Aircraft
Anomalies
Applied sciences
Assessments
Characterisation
Devices
Earth sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Engineering and environment geology. Geothermics
Exact sciences and technology
Gamma spectrometry
Geographic Information Systems - instrumentation
Global environmental pollution
Lightweight
Pollution
Pollution, environment geology
Radar - instrumentation
Radiation monitoring
Radiation Monitoring - instrumentation
Radioactive Fallout - analysis
Radioactive materials
Radioisotopes - analysis
Remote Sensing Technology - instrumentation
Soil Pollutants, Radioactive - analysis
Spatial resolution
Spectrometry, Gamma - instrumentation
Unmanned aerial system
Weight reduction
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (FDNPP) incident released a significant mass of radioactive material into the atmosphere. An estimated 22% of this material fell out over land following the incident. Immediately following the disaster, there was a severe lack of information not only pertaining to the identity of the radioactive material released, but also its distribution as fallout in the surrounding regions. Indeed, emergency aid groups including the UN did not have sufficient location specific radiation data to accurately assign exclusion and evacuation zones surrounding the plant in the days and weeks following the incident. A newly developed instrument to provide rapid and high spatial resolution assessment of radionuclide contamination in the environment is presented. The device consists of a low cost, lightweight, unmanned aerial platform with a microcontroller and integrated gamma spectrometer, GPS and LIDAR. We demonstrate that with this instrument it is possible to rapidly and remotely detect ground-based radiation anomalies with a high spatial resolution (
ISSN:0265-931X
1879-1700
DOI:10.1016/j.jenvrad.2014.05.008