If, by misfortune, a new accident of the Chernobyl type breed, could the authorities still claim that the radioactive cloud has not reached the border Certainly not, say experts from the Institute of radiation protection and nuclear safety (IRSN), in charge of the monitoring of radioactivity in the environment. The Institute has also just put online a new website (), on which an interactive map of the French territory allows to access the results of the measurements of radioactivity in all media (air, water, soil, food) that it monitors almost in real time. Drawing on the findings of the fear and polemics about in July 2008 by the rejection of 74 kilos of uranium in the River at Socatri reprocessing plant on the site of the plant in Tricastin, the IRSN plays transparency and makes available to the citizen from its 1,500 points of monitoring measures.
In the the nuclear countries of the world, it is le Vésinet, chic suburb of Paris region, which focuses the heart of the French monitoring of radioactivity in the environment. A succession of small laboratories hidden between the Seine and villas houses sophisticated analysis tools to detect any addition of artificial radioactivity in samples of soil, plants, air or water. In a small room hides even a strange library: files contain thousands of small envelopes, which are dragged daily filters, whose fine dust are analyzed.
Three objectives
Sixty of the aerosol measuring stations cover the territory. Every day, their filter is identified and sent to le Vésinet to be analyzed. Normally, the background noise of the natural radioactivity is very small, between 0.1 and 1 microbecquerel per cubic metre of air. Only the accident of Chernobyl in April 1986 had changed the course of things, with measures that are past 1,000 times above the threshold of detection.
The IRSN pursues three objectives: ensure that discharges of nuclear installations do not exceed the permissions, to ensure no risk to human and ecosystem health in the State of the environment and, finally, to detect any accidental contamination. A seemingly simple mission, but seeking a logistics to take regular samples of Earth, plants, aerosols and water around the nuclear facilities of basis, 24 hours a day monitoring 164 probes of network Téléray, responsible for measuring the radioactivity in the air continuously and trigger the alert to any outbreak of the dose rate of gamma rays. "We are less concerned about our measures the possibility to have access to the telephone network accident." "Remember, after the explosion of AZF, it had been saturated for three quarters of an hour", jokes the engineer of guard in charge of monitoring the Téléray screens.
Is the field of radiation protection of the environment, an area of recent research, which started in the 2000s, while the radiation protection of the human is already an old science. Of the taking of a sample to his analysis, nothing is left to chance. It must first choose the good site, isolated within a radius of 5 kilometres of nuclear power plants, under the prevailing winds of preference. Once selected and returned to le Vésinet samples, all art is to convert, be it water, milk, wheat, in mini-galettes dry to a gamma-ray Spectrometry.
All the incidents recorded
Nothing is less obvious than to measure the flow of radionuclides from the ground or air to grass, the grass in the cow and cow to human. At least, no incident escapes analysis. In 2007, the IRSN in recorded five, without gravity. Only one certainty, "the exposure of people to radiation varies if they live in a clay or granite, in plain or mountain basin, but does not vary according to whether they live near or far from a nuclear facility," says Jean Marc Peres, head of the study and monitoring service. Off cross French territory would thus not contaminated by nuclear activities. Director of the environment and the intervention of the IRSN, Didier Champion said even that historic contamination, due to the impact of the testing of atomic weapons and the Chernobyl cloud became very small: "I think that today measured activity is not superior to what it would have found in the 1940s."
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