The consequences of the Chernobyl accident: First results in the radioecology project of the French-German initiative.

G. Deville-Cavelin, H. Biesold, Ch. Brun-Yaba and V. Chabanyuk Actes du NATO advanced research workshop " Role of GIS in lifting the cloud off Chernobyl " 17-21 septembre 2001, hotel Yalta Ukraine. J. Kolejka (ed.), 49-65. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Introduction In April 1996 in Vienna, during the IAEA conference for the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl accident the French and German Ministers of Environment decided to start actions for evaluating consequences of the accident and help the three concerned countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to overcome those consequences. This French-German Initiative (FGI) for Chernobyl was materialised by an agreement signed by the "Institut de Protection et de Sûreté Nucléaire" (IPSN - France) and the Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS - Germany) with the Ukrainian authorities (Chornobyl Centre). FGI includes three projects, one for studying the Safety of the sarcophagus, the second for evaluating the radioecological consequences of the accident and the third for the health effects of the disaster. The Project n°2, dedicated to Radioecology studies began on the end of 1998 by the signature of nine specific agreements (see "Figure 1. "). Each agreement is corresponding to a specific sub-project in the chosen field: • ecological portrait of the contaminated territories; • studies on the wastes disposal; • transfer of radionuclides (RN) in the different parts of the ecosystems, from soils to plants and from plants to animals, by surface runoff, in the aquatic environment and the urban environment; • studies on countermeasures and their effectiveness, in agricultural, natural and. urban areas. The paper describes the main results achieved in the sub-projects.