Projects

Toyota

ASSESSMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL RADIOACTIVITY IN VEHICLES IMPORTED FROM JAPAN BY TOYOTA MOTOR ITALIA

Description of the work
ambiente s.c. carried out monitoring and radiometric surveillance of motor vehicles cargo from Japan to Livorno in order to check the possible radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Articulation of the activities
In order to identify any contaminating particles, two samples of smears were taken (inside and outside the passenger compartment of a sample car). Additionally, a range of spectrometer measurements were done using HPGe EG&G Ortec detectors (mod. GEM-15190, serial no. 28-TP30004B, with a diameter of 49.7 mm and height of 55.0 mm, resolution of 1.72 keV to 1.33 MeV (Co-60)), inserted inside 10 cm thick parallelepiped lead shielding (mod. LBE 100 produced by Comecer srl ) connected to a multichannel EG&G Ortec 92X Spectrum Master. The recorded measures were processed using the software GammaVision for Windows (mod. A66-B32 version 4.12). The samples were identified as “Spectrum inside vehicle” and “Spectrum outside vehicle”.
The results of the smears samples analysis, showed some peaks characteristic of radioactivity, comparable to a natural source (as can be seen from the analysis of the spectrum identified as “Specious spectrum”), and showed no presence of artificial products such as 137Cs, 60Co, 131I etc..