August 6, 2021 We held an IER Special Seminar online.＜by Dr. Vladimir Petrov＞

In some of the classes of the Master’s Program of Major in Environmental Radioactivity, distinguished external researchers are invited as guest lecturers, and their classes are open to other faculty members on campus as “Special Seminars”.

On August 6, the lecture on the subject “Nuclear Disaster Studies” by Prof. Vladimir Petrov was attended by three IER graduate school master students, and several IER, Fukushima University, Shizuoka University and Moscow State University (MSU) scientists. Prof. Petrov talked about the history of Radiochemistry Division of Chemistry Department MSU and its main approaches and results of nuclear disaster studies. Nuclear accidents in PA “Mayak” (Kyshtym) in 1957, Chernobyl NPP accident in 1986 and Tomsk accident at reprocessing plant in 1993 have been considered in detail. Major attention was devoted to sources and behavior of hot particles of different origin in the environment. Unique data on properties of Chernobyl “lava”, originally melted and then solidified nuclear fuel and approaches to their investigations have been presented. Basic analytical methods to study nuclear disaster studies of materials and samples such as autoradiography, electron microscopy, X-ray techniques, Raman scattering etc. were described. In the Q&A session, the students and other attendees asked many challenging questions and discussed the relevance of experience and knowledge gained after the nuclear disasters in former USSR to emergency response and environmental remediation strategy in Fukushima.