An Overview of Our Research

Abstract

More than 10 years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear accident. We, researchers in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo, have begun to work right after the accident to determine the effect of radioactive materials on agricultural production, and still now, we are continuing the research, how radioactive cesium has been moving or what kind of problems are left in the environment, etc. Radioactive contamination was found everywhere in the environment after the accident. However, during these years, the radioactivity of the soil, rivers, or mountains gradually decreased. One of the reasons is decontamination of the place. Since radioactive cesium hardly moves from the place where it was adsorbed, the removal of the surface soil could reduce the radioactivity. Mixing the surface soil with deeper soil could also reduce the radioactivity in the field. The radioactivity of the agricultural products grown in the field was hardly detected a few years after the accident. Now, the only place where decontamination activities are difficult to perform is the mountain area, because the area is large, covering approximately 70% of Fukushima prefecture. Therefore, the radioactivity in the mountain is one of the issues that has grabbed the attention of the people now, and more research results related to the mountains are collected in this book compared to those of the former 3 books of this series already published.