ARMS

If you wander around the Zone long enough, sooner or later you will come across strange white houses measuring 4-6 meters (13-20 ft). They stand in the most unexpected places: on the industrial site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in abandoned villages, in the middle of fields. A concrete building without windows, encircled by equipment – towers with instruments, small troughs. In the buildings is usually something noisy, some mechanism is working. These are posts for the Exclusion Zone’s radiation and environmental monitoring system. Each post has a set of instruments for monitoring the surrounding environment. In total, there are 13 of these posts: 4 are in the 10-kilometer zone, and 9 are in the 30-kilometer zone. They were set up after the accident and began operating in 1988. Their prototype was a radiation monitoring system used at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site (in Kazakhstan).

An observation network of 40 special sensors forms the basis of the automated radiation monitoring system (ARMS). ARMS is the first link in the detection of a major radiation incident. Therefore, its information is constantly sent to the operational dispatch center. In normal mode, the sensor transmits data once per hour; in the event of an alarm, every 3 minutes. In case of an accident, the system will allow for the visualization of the radiation situation and track its changes.

This article was published in the book Interesting Chernobyl.
You could download this book in PDF file for free here.

© Sky Horse Publishing House (Kyiv) / Nahs Haus, 2019
Copying and publication of this article is possible only with the written permission of the publishing house.
Official website of the Awesome Heritage series: awesomeheritage.com

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