Abstract
Abstract. Shortly after the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (ChNPP) in 1986, radioactive fall-out and contaminated trees (socalled Red Forest) were buried in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (ChEZ). These days, exact locations of the buried contaminated material are needed. Moreover, 3D vegetation maps are necessary to simulate the impact of tornados and forest fire. After 30 years, some of the so-called trenches and clamps are visible. However, some of them are overgrown and have slightly settled in the centimeter and decimeter range. This paper presents a pipeline that comprises 3D vegetation mapping and machine learning methods to precisely map trenches and clamps from remote sensing data. The dataset for our experiments consists of UAV-based LiDAR data, multi-spectral data, and aerial gamma-spectrometry data. Depending on the study areas overall accuracies ranging from 95.6 % to 99.0 % were reached for the classification of radioactive deposits. Our first results demonstrate an accurate and reliable UAV-based detection of unknown radioactive biomass deposits in the ChEZ.
Highlights
In the first months after the Chernobyl accident large parts of contaminated material resulting from clean-up operations were buried into nine radioactive waste temporary storage places (RWTSP)
These RWTSP were created in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (ChNPP) and contain about 1000 excavated trenches and/or clamps in which radioactive material was buried and covered with a clean soil layer (Molitor et al, 2017b)
We suppose that the gamma spectrometer measurement is a gamma ray superimposition of the buried radioactive material, the constant impact of the top soil layer, and the constant impact of the background radiation from space
Summary
In the first months after the Chernobyl accident large parts of contaminated material resulting from clean-up operations were buried into nine radioactive waste temporary storage places (RWTSP). Parts of the RWTSP were re-vegetated in order to stabilize the surface covers and to reduce the effect of re-suspension of contaminated dust particles by wind. These clean-up operations led to a higher risk of groundwater contamination. These RWTSP were created in the vicinity of the ChNPP and contain about 1000 excavated trenches and/or clamps in which radioactive material was buried and covered with a clean soil layer (Molitor et al, 2017b). In order to justify and substantiate action plans to mitigate actual and future hazards, it is extremely important to have appropriate up-to-date descriptions and evaluations on the current radiological situation and its evolution
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