The Fukushima inverse problem

Marta Martinez-Camara, Ivan Dokmanic, Juri Ranieri, Robin Scheibler, Martin Vetterli, Andreas Stohl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Knowing what amount of radioactive material was released from Fukushima in March 2011 is crucial to understand the scope of the consequences. Moreover, it could be used in forward simulations to obtain accurate maps of deposition. But these data are often not publicly available, or are of questionable quality. We propose to estimate the emission waveforms by solving an inverse problem. Previous approaches rely on a detailed expert guess of how the releases appeared, and they produce a solution strongly biased by this guess. If we plant a nonexistent peak in the guess, the solution also exhibits a nonexistent peak. We propose a method based on sparse regularization that solves the Fukushima inverse problem blindly. Together with the atmospheric dispersion models and worldwide radioactivity measurements our method correctly reconstructs the times of major events during the accident, and gives plausible estimates of the released quantities of Xenon.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2013 - Proceedings
Pages4330-4334
Number of pages5
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 18 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event2013 38th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2013 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: May 26 2013May 31 2013

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Other

Other2013 38th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2013
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period5/26/135/31/13

Keywords

  • Daiichi
  • FLEXPART
  • Fukushima
  • dispersion
  • explosion
  • inverse problems
  • nuclear power plant

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The Fukushima inverse problem'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this