One Year After Fukushima

Save the date: 9 March

Vienna, 6 March 2012

Apart from detecting nuclear tests, each of our four monitoring technologies – seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide – provides States with real-time, high-quality data that can help save lives in the event of natural disasters.

The colloquium CTBTO Past and Future Contributions to Emergency Preparedness: Fukushima Case Study will discuss, in particular, the International Monitoring System’s capability to enable national authorities to issue timely tsunami warnings. It will also assess the dispersal of radioactive emissions after a nuclear accident. Japan recently made a large voluntary contribution to further enhance the CTBTO's capabilities to monitor airborne radioactivity.

Ambassador Toshiro Ozawa, Permanent Representative of Japan to the International Organizations in Vienna, Deputy Director General Denis Flory of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Wolfgang Weiss, Chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and a number of other international organizations and experts from the CTBTO will participate.

When - 9 March 2012, from 10:00 to 13:00

Where - Vienna International Centre, Vienna, Austria, M Building, room M3

The event is open to media and civil society and will also be live-streamed on the CTBTO’s website. More detailed information will follow.

Background

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) bans all nuclear explosions by everyone, everywhere. A verification regime with over 300 sensors monitors the globe around the clock for nuclear explosions in order to detect violations of the Treaty. During the Tohoku earthquake and nuclear accident, the CTBTO data helped Japanese authorities issue timely tsunami warnings and later helped monitor radioactive releases from the damaged Fukushima power plant.

ENDS

© Scoop Media