Sampling Programmes for Countrywide Monitoring in Hungary

Nanba et al. provide a detailed description about a Hungarian monitoring programme and present a study on an incident at the Paks nuclear power plant in 2003, the lessons learned in Hungary after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and a countrywide monitoring programme proposal for Japan. Since each sample is unique, a sufficiently large number of units should be sampled to demonstrate their representativeness. In a consolidated period, sample variability dominates over the variability of the laboratory analysis — on the order of 20% compared with the analysis replication variation of just 1% or less. The two major goals of the countrywide monitoring programme under the Ministry of Agriculture is to observe long term trends and to determine the ingestion dose from locally produced foodstuffs. The programme assesses the impact of all nuclear facilities in Hungary and at the borders, with emergency response zones of 30 km, 80 km and 300 km around the facilities. Many circumstances are considered, such as geographical distribution of production, structural changes in agriculture and consumption habits, organization of public administration and capacities of radiochemical laboratories.