DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7796791
title: Mapping of solar panels and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident-associated radioactive waste storage in 2022 and 2023, Fukushima, Japan

description: The policy of reconstruction after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant accident has led to a radical transformation of the landscapes of Fukushima Prefecture especially in two aspects (Asanuma-Brice et al., 2023). The first is related to an extensive decontamination policy which resulted in the removal of more than 13 million m<sup>3</sup> of contaminated soil (MOEJ, 2021). The second is the widespread installation of solar panels, which demonstrate the transition decided by the Prefecture and the inhabitants in terms of energy policy. A systematic mapping of these features was carried out from the satellite imagery of Google Map (2023) within the boundaries of Fukushima Prefecture. The objective was to highlight the evolution of specific land use features that are captured imprecisely by automatic detection mapping. We focused on the main visible change in the landscape in terms of land use since Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident: contaminated waste disposal areas and solar panel fields. These zones were delineated allowing a calculation of the corresponding surface areas (m<sup>2</sup>).<strong> The dataset is composed of 4 shapefile layers: contaminated waste deposits in 2022 and 2023, solar panels in 2022 and 2023. For the year 2022 the last update was conducted in July 2022 and for the year 2023 the last update took place in March 2023.</strong> As the land use is in constant and rapid transition (Asanuma-Brice, 2021), we considered as contaminated waste deposits, the permanent storage centers as well as the sites where there are still bags of contaminated waste in varying numbers, knowing that they will be removed and stored on other dedicated sites (Evrard et al., 2019). This choice was made to potentially identify, when the map was updated, the future uses of the land where this waste was stored temporarily. This dataset is part of a larger project that aims to provide the community with an interactive tool (https://mitatelab.cnrs.fr/mitate-labs-map-of-solar-panel-and-contaminated-wasted-land/) that makes available various types of information essential to the analysis of the reconstruction, such as: the delineation of the evacuated zone (which evolved throughout time), the delineation of the municipality boundaries affected by the reconstruction policy, the main services found in these localities, the location of the memorials of the disaster in the zone, as well as the geo-localization of the soil/sediment samples collected by other Mitate lab researchers in order to investigate the redistribution of radionuclides in the environment (Evrard et al., 2021).
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