Affiliation:
1. Saint-Petersburg Research Institute of Radiation Hygiene after Professor P.V. Ramzaev, Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing
Abstract
After the Chernobyl accident, a certain proportion of agricultural land was withdrawn from normal use due to significant radioactive contamination. Forestry is one of the options currently under consideration to return the abandoned agricultural land to economic circulation in Russia. When using former agricultural land for forestry in radioactively contaminated areas, it is important to have an assessment of the potential radiation doses for forestry workers and the public. The aim of this study was to assess the radiological situation in a young pine forest planted and grown after the Chernobyl accident in the resettlement zone on a former arable field. A nearby old pine forest, which had grown before the Chernobyl accident, was taken for comparison. The study of the radiological situation was performed in the period 1998–2022. In the young forest, 137Cs was fairly evenly distributed in the upper 20 cm soil layer; further with depth, the activity concentration of 137Cs sharply decreased. In the old forest, the maximum activity concentration of 137Cs in the soil was in the top 0–2 cm layer. The activity concentration of 137Cs decreased with depth. In 1998, the average value of the absorbed dose rate in the air from 137Cs+134Cs was lower by a factor of 3 in the young forest compared to the old forest. The difference was associated with differences in the vertical distributions of 137Cs in the soil. Over time, the absorbed dose rate in air from 137Cs+134Cs decreased at both sites with the same effective halftime period of 21.7 year. The activity concentration of 137Cs in the biota (pine trees, edible mushrooms) in the young forest was lower by a factor of 4–30 compared to the old forest. The “forest” component of the external effective dose to adults from the 137Cs source in the young forest was lower by a factor of 3 compared to the old forest. The “forest” component of the internal effective dose from 137Cs was lower by a factor of 10 when eating edible mushrooms from the young forest compared to the old one. In general, the performed study shows that the use of radioactively contaminated abandoned arable land for forestry can be expedient and justified from a radiological point of view.
Publisher
SPRI of Radiation Hygiene Prof. PV Ramzaev
Subject
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging
Reference22 articles.
1. Environmental Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident and their Remediation: Twenty Years of Experience. Report of the Chernobyl Forum Expert Group ‘Environment’. IAEA, Vienna, 2006.
2. Russian National Report: 35 years of the Chernobyl Accident. Results and Prospects of Overcoming its Consequences in Russia. 1986-2021 / Ed.: L.A. Bolshov; the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow: Academ-Print; 2021. (In Russian).
3. Shubina OA, Titov IE, Krechetnikov VV, Sanzharova SI. Issues of return to economic use of territories temporarily withdrawn from land use after the Chernobyl accident. In: “Actual Problems of Radioecology”. Proceedings of the Federal State Budgetary Scientific Institution “All-Russian Research Institute of Radiology and Agroecology” (FGBNU VNIIRAE). Ed.: N.I. Sanzharova. Obninsk; 2018. P. 99–119. (In Russian).
4. Hostert P, Kuemmerle T, Prishchepov A, Sieber A, Lambin EF, Radeloff VC. Rapid land use change after socio-economic disturbances: the collapse of the Soviet Union versus Chernobyl. Environmental Research Letters. 2011;6: 045201.
5. Matsala M, Bilous A, Myroniuk V, Holiaka D, Schepaschenko D, See L, et al. The return of nature to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: increases in forest cover of 1.5 times since the 1986 disaster. Forests. 2021;12: 1024.