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"A large area that includes Fukushima Prefecture was seriously contaminated by radioactive materials emitted into the atmosphere and the ocean by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (hereafter, FDNPS1) of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which was caused by the Tohoku Region Pacific Coast Earthquake in 2011. The emitted radioactive materials were transported by seasonal wind and ocean currents to a wide area of the globe and have been observed in various places in the Northern Hemisphere. These materials have also been detected in soil, forests, lakes, rivers, and seas due to fallout and direct discharge, and continued movement in the environment"--

International audience The Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident released limited amounts of actinides on soils of Japan. Characterisation of these particles is essential to determine the fate of actinides in the environment. The method presented in this paper, based on α-tracks detections, microscope observations and mass-spectrometry measurements, was designed to identify and characterize actinide-bearing particles in soil samples. The method was tested on a road dust sample collected in the main radioactive plume of the Fukushima region. Accordingly, α-tracks detection was demonstrated to provide a powerful technique to localise these particles and prepare their morphological, elemental and isotopic characterization.

Artificial radionuclides including radiocesium (134Cs and 137Cs) and radiosilver (110mAg) were released into the environment following the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in March 2011. These particle-bound substances deposited on soils of Northeastern Japan located predominantly within a ~3000 km2 radioactive fallout plume and drained by several coastal rivers to the Pacific Ocean. The current dataset that can be accessed at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.928594 compiles gamma-emitting artificial radionuclide activities measured in 782 sediment samples collected from 27 to 71 locations during 16 fieldwork campaigns conducted in Japan between November 2011 and November 2020 in river catchments draining the main radioactive plume. This database may be useful to evaluate and anticipate the post-accidental redistribution of radionuclides in the environment and for the spatial validation of models simulating the transfer of radiocesium across continental landscapes.