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ROLE OF EROSION PROCESSES IN TRANSFER OF RADIONUCLIDES: RESULTS OF FIELD EXPERIMENTS 1
Author(s) -
Khanbilvardi R.,
Shestopalov V,
Onishchenko I.,
Bublyas V,
Gudzenko V
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
jawra journal of the american water resources association
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.957
H-Index - 105
eISSN - 1752-1688
pISSN - 1093-474X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-1688.1999.tb04182.x
Subject(s) - surface runoff , radionuclide , environmental science , topsoil , washout , erosion , hydrology (agriculture) , watershed , soil science , soil water , geology , ecology , paleontology , oceanography , physics , geotechnical engineering , quantum mechanics , machine learning , biology , computer science
An experimental one‐year fieldwork has been conducted in the vicinity of the Chernobyl NPP, within an agricultural watershed, to study the transfer of radionuclides brought into the environment by the disaster of 1986. Presented are results of observation of the washout of 137 Cs from the runoff plot both in natural conditions and under artificial rainfalls. Beside traditional hydro‐logical methods, new techniques were used allowing to consider microtopographical peculiarities of the runoff plot and their role in the redistribution of radionuclides. The estimate of the annual mass balance for the soil and the radionuclides within the runoff plot has shown that, regardless of significant areal variation of their concentration, the 137 Cs washout with the solid runoff resulted from artificial rainfalls amounts to some 1 percent of its reserves in the uppermost 5 cm of the topsoil. The same parameter for the natural runoff is lower by an order of magnitude. Both these factors of self‐purification are about two times less than natural radioactive decay of 137 Cs.