Principles and Methods of Radiocapacity Assessment of Ecology Systems

Abstract

This article was written soon after the Chernobyl accident when the strategy of countermeasures was worked out to disaster relief. One of the important problems was assessment of the conditioning capacity of the Dnieper reservoirs. The authors showed approaches to the radiocapacity assessment of the cascade reservoirs. The article is based on the investigations in the Southern Ural laboratory of N.W. Timofeeff-Ressovsky (The use of radiation and radiation emitters in the experimental biogeocenology. Botanical J 42(3):161–194, 1957), the concept of radiocapacity offered by Agre and Korogodin (The distribution of radioactive contamination in landlocked body of water Med Radiol 1:63–73, 1960), and understanding of the reliability of aquatic ecosystems of Polikarpov (Environmental introduction to the problem of the reliability of self-cleaning function of the aquatic ecosystem, Naukova Dumka, Kiev, pp 172–179 1985). The authors estimate radiocapacity as a measure of the reliability of the ecosystem, which is determined by the implementation of reproductive and conditioning functions in the environment. This approach was used and developed in the research of the Dnieper cascade reservoirs and the Black sea contaminations by Kutlakhmedov (Way to the theoretical radioecology. Phytosociocentre Publication, Kiev, 360 p, 2015), G.G. Polikarpov, V.N. Egorov, and B.S. Gulin (Egorov et al. in Black Sea In: Atwood DA (Eds.) Radionuclides in the environment. Wiley, Chichester (UK) pp 430–4522010; Gulin and Egorov in Self-purification of seawater: a measure for environmental regulation, Nova Science Publishers, New York pp 93–126, 2013).

For the first time the article was published in the book “Heuristic Radiobiology”, Kiev, Naukova Dumka, 1988, 109-115. It was presented by the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany, AS USSR, Kiev the A.O. Kovalevskiy Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, AS USSR, Sevastopol, Ukraine Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.