• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.172-195
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• 2015

Multiple nationwide opinion surveys, carried out by the government (cabinet office), major media (national newspapers and NHK), the National Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, have revealed that the Fukushima nuclear accident has heightened people's perception of disaster risks, fear of nuclear accidents, and increased recognition of pollution issues, and has changed public opinion on nuclear energy policy. The opinion gap on nuclear energy policy between specialists and lay people has widened since the disaster. The results of the Japanese General Social Survey data show that objections to the promotion of nuclear energy are strong among females, and weaker among young males and the supporters of the LDP. These findings are similar to the data collected after the Chernobyl accident. People who live in a 70km radius of nuclear plants tend to evaluate nuclear disaster risks higher. Distance from nuclear plants and the perception of earthquake risk interactively correlate with opinions on nuclear issues. Among people whose evaluation of earthquake risk is low, those who live nearer to the plants are more likely to object to the abolishment of nuclear plants. It was also found that the nuclear disaster has changed people's behavior; they now try to save electricity. The level of commitment to energy saving is found to relate to opinions on nuclear issues.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• 제46권1호
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• pp.24-31
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• 2021

Decommissioning efforts are underway at the reactor where the accident occurred, namely the damaged Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP). However, a large amount of groundwater flowing into the site has become contaminated with radioactive substances and is stored in tanks on site, which has hampered the decommissioning work. Although the inflow of groundwater has been greatly reduced through measures such as the construction of frost walls, approximately 170 ㎥ of water treated by the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) is being stored in tanks, each day. The tanks used to store this treated water are expected to become full by around the summer of 2022. It is not easy to get people to understand the efforts of all concerned parties, and providing clear information to these concerned parties is also a challenge. Questions have also been raised regarding whether other alternatives have been fully explored in the ALPS subcommittee. Some people have commented that the answers to the questions raised regarding the biological effects of tritium transmutation are inadequate. Some suspect that the answers are too detailed and incomprehensible, and that the respondents may be manipulating the public with some malicious intent. In any case, each possible plan presents both advantages and disadvantages, depending on the people who are involved. That makes it an ethical and vexing issue that can sway decisions, as perspectives change. While the environmental release plan is scientifically safe, it may represent a painful alternative. On the other hand, a more careful and imaginative approach to the idea of continued storage in tanks or other forms of storage may reveal some troublesome hidden disadvantages. Under these circumstances, experts must be prepared to answer people's questions in a comprehensive and robust manner.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• 제46권3호
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• pp.134-142
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• 2021

Background: From 2018 to 2020, the Expert Study on Public Understanding after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident (the Expert Study Group) identified and analyzed activities designed to promote public understanding of science and radiation since the Fukushima accident, and held discussions on how to achieve public understanding in the situation where public confidence has been lost, and how experts should prepare for dealing with the public. This panel session was held at the 53^rd meeting of the Japan Health Physics Society on June 30, 2020. Materials and Methods: First, three subgroup (SG) leaders reported their research methods and results. Then, two designated speakers, who participated as observers of the Expert Study Group, commented on the activities. Next, the five speakers held a panel discussion. Finally, the rapporteur summarized. Results and Discussion: SG leaders presented reports from researchers and practitioners in health physics and environmental risks who provided information after the Fukushima accident. During the discussion, experts in sociology and ethics discussed the issues, focusing on the overall goals of the three groups, local (personal) and mass communication, and ethical values. Many of the activities instituted by the experts after the accident were aimed at public understanding of science (that is, to provide knowledge to residents), but by taking into account interactions with residents and their ethical norms, the experts shifted to supporting the residents' decision-making through public engagement. The need to consider both content and channels is well known in the field of health communication, and overlaps with the above discussion. Conclusion: How to implement and promote the public engagement in society was discussed in both the floor and designated discussions. Cooperation between local communities and organizations that have already gained trust is also necessary in order to develop relationships with local residents in normal times, to establish an information transmission system, and to make it work effectively.

• 한국지진공학회논문집
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• 제25권5호
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• pp.223-232
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• 2021

The spatial variation characteristics of seismic motions at the nuclear power plant's site and structures were analyzed using earthquake records obtained at the Fukushima nuclear power plant during the Great East Japan Earthquake. The ground responses amplified as they approached the soil surface from the lower rock surface, and the amplification occurred intensively at about 50 m near the ground. Due to the soil layer's nonlinear characteristics caused by the strong seismic motion, the ground's natural frequency derived from the response spectrum ratio appeared to be smaller than that calculated from the shear wave velocity profile. The spatial variation of the peak ground acceleration at the ground surface of the power plant site showed a significant difference of about 0.6 g at the maximum. As a result of comparing the response spectrums at the basement of the structure with the design response spectrum, there was a large variability by each power plant unit. The difference was more significant in the Fukushima Daiichi site record, which showed larger peak ground acceleration at the surface. The earthquake motions input to the basement of the structure amplified according to the structure's height. The natural frequency obtained from the recorded results was lower than that indicated in the previous research. Also, the floor response spectrum change according to the location at the same height was investigated. The vertical response on the foundation surface showed a significant difference in spectral acceleration depending on the location. The amplified response in the structure showed a different variability depending on the type of structure and the target frequency.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제47권1호
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• pp.11-25
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• 2015

The accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011, caused by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, resulted in a failure of the power systems that are needed to cool the reactors at the plant. The accident progression in the absence of heat removal systems caused Units 1-3 to undergo fuel melting. Containment pressurization and hydrogen explosions ultimately resulted in the escape of radioactivity from reactor containments into the atmosphere and ocean. Problems in containment venting operation, leakage from primary containment boundary to the reactor building, improper functioning of standby gas treatment system (SGTS), unmitigated hydrogen accumulation in the reactor building were identified as some of the reasons those added-up in the severity of the accident. The Fukushima accident not only initiated worldwide demand for installation of adequate control and mitigation measures to minimize the potential source term to the environment but also advocated assessment of the existing mitigation systems performance behavior under a wide range of postulated accident scenarios. The uncertainty in estimating the released fraction of the radionuclides due to the Fukushima accident also underlined the need for comprehensive understanding of fission product behavior as a function of the thermal hydraulic conditions and the type of gaseous, aqueous, and solid materials available for interaction, e.g., gas components, decontamination paint, aerosols, and water pools. In the light of the Fukushima accident, additional experimental needs identified for hydrogen and fission product issues need to be investigated in an integrated and optimized way. Additionally, as more and more passive safety systems, such as passive autocatalytic recombiners and filtered containment venting systems are being retrofitted in current reactors and also planned for future reactors, identified hydrogen and fission product issues will need to be coupled with the operation of passive safety systems in phenomena oriented and coupled effects experiments. In the present paper, potential hydrogen and fission product issues raised by the Fukushima accident are discussed. The discussion focuses on hydrogen and fission product behavior inside nuclear power plant containments under severe accident conditions. The relevant experimental investigations conducted in the technical scale containment THAI (thermal hydraulics, hydrogen, aerosols, and iodine) test facility (9.2 m high, 3.2 m in diameter, and $60m^3$ volume) are discussed in the light of the Fukushima accident.

• 신재생에너지
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.37-41
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• 2011

This paper presents a Combined solar-wave Power Generation (CPG) concept that the CPG unit is maintained as buoyant at the level of sea water and it is also supported by a submerged tunnel, with the aim of supplying emergency electric power during the station blackout events of nuclear power plants. The CPG concept has been motivated from the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi Accidents due to the loss of both offsite AC power and emergency diesel power caused by natural hazards such as earthquake and tsunami. The CPG is conceptualized by applying different types and different sites for emergency power generation, in order to reduce common cause failures of emergency power suppliers due to natural hazards. Thus, the CPG can provide a new mean for supplying emergency electric power during station blackout events of nuclear power plants. For this application, the CPG requirements are described with a typical configuration at the ocean side of a submerged tunnel.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• 제45권1호
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• pp.2-10
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• 2020

Background: Huge amounts of radionuclides were released into the environment due to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident, which caused not only serious contamination on the ground, but also radiation exposure to the public. One problem that remains in performing the dose estimation is the difficulty of estimating the internal thyroid dose due to the intake of radioiodine (mainly, ¹³¹I) because of limitations to the human data available. Materials and Methods: The relevant papers were collected and reviewed by the authors. The results of thyroid dose estimates from different studies were tabulated for comparison. Results and Discussion: The thyroid dose estimates from the studies varied widely. The dose estimates by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation were higher than the others due to the ingestion dose being based on conservative assumptions. The dose estimates by Japanese experts were mostly below 20-30 mSv. The recent studies suggested that exposure on March 12, 2011 would be crucial for late evacuees from the areas near the FD-NPP because of the possible intake of short-lived radionuclides other than ¹³¹I. Further multilateral studies are vital to reduce uncertainties in the present dose estimations. Conclusion: The estimation of the thyroid doses to Fukushima residents still has many uncertainties. However, it is considered unlikely that the thyroid doses exceeded 50 mSv except in some extreme cases. Further multilateral studies are thus necessary to reduce the uncertainties in the present dose estimations.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제56권6호
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• pp.2266-2273
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• 2024

A machine learning platform is proposed for the diagnosis of a severe accident progression in a nuclear power plant. To predict the key parameters for accident management including lost signals, a long short term memory (LSTM) network is proposed, where multiple accident scenarios are used for training. Training and test data were produced by MELCOR simulation of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident at unit 3. Feature variables were selected among plant parameters, where the importance ranking was determined by a recursive feature elimination technique using RandomForestRegressor. To answer the question of whether a reduced order ML model could predict the complex transient response, we performed a systematic sensitivity study for the choices of target variables, the combination of training and test data, the number of feature variables, and the number of neurons to evaluate the performance of the proposed ML platform. The number of sensitivity cases was chosen to guarantee a 95 % tolerance limit with a 95 % confidence level based on Wilks' formula to quantify the uncertainty of predictions. The results of investigations indicate that the proposed ML platform consistently predicts the target variable. The median and mean predictions were close to the true value.

• 대한원격탐사학회지
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• 제37권6_3호
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• pp.2027-2034
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• 2021

다중 시기 KOMPSAT-3/3A 고해상도 위성영상을 이용하여 후쿠시마 제1 원자력 발전소 주변 지역에 대한 식생지수를 산출하고 식생 변화의 양상을 분석하였다. 식생지수 산출 시에는 KOMPSAT-3/3A 위성영상의 지표반사도를 사용하였다. 4개 연도의 위성영상을 사용하였으며 이 영상이 중첩되는 지역을 연구의 대상이 되는 관심영역으로 정하였다. 자료 분석 방법으로 주로 식생이 분포하는 지역을 지나가는 측선을 설정하여 연도별 변화 양상을 살펴보았다. 또한, 2차원 공간상의 식생지수의 변화를 정량적으로 나타내기 위하여 관심영역 내에서 랜덤 포인트를 추출하여 상자그림으로 나타내었다. 연구의 주요 결과는 원전 인근 지역에서 2014년 식생지수는 관심영역 내에서 낮은 값으로 나타났지만 이후 2021년까지 지속해서 식생이 발달하고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 측선이나 상자그림으로 나타낸 변화 모니터링 결과에서도 확인할 수 있었다. 현장 자료를 수집하기 어려운 후쿠시마 원전 지역과 같이 접근이 제한되는 재난 지역에서는 위성영상을 이용하여 높은 정확도를 갖는 토지 피복 분류 산출물을 얻기가 어렵기 때문에 고해상도 위성영상 정보부터 얻는 식생지수와 같이 기본적인 산출물을 이용하여 분석하는 방식이 적절하다. 한편 국제적으로 공동 활용이 가능한 위성정보 자원의 활용 체계 구축과 함께 우리나라에 영향을 줄 수 있는 주변국의 환경 변화를 주기적으로 모니터링하기 위하여 고해상도 위성영상을 이용한 활용 모델과 시스템을 구축할 필요가 있다.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권2호
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• pp.376-385
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• 2021

Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) has improved its elemental technologies used for assessing external events since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Accident in 2011. HRA needs to be improved for analyzing tasks performed under extreme conditions (e.g., different actors responding to external events or performing operations using portable mitigation equipment). To make these improvements, it is essential to understand plant-specific and scenario-specific conditions that affect human performance. The Nuclear Risk Research Center (NRRC) of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI) has developed an HRA guide that compiles qualitative analysis methods for collecting plant-specific and scenario-specific conditions that affect human performance into "narratives," reflecting the latest research trends, and models for analysis of tasks under extreme conditions.