On Sept 28, Roland Keil, representative of DLR Project Management Agency, and CASIB's head of bureau Peter Liebelt jointly visited one of several sites of investigation within the CLIENT II project DUM-GEM in Kaji Say, a small community on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul (Kyrgyzstan). The DLR Project Management Agency has been assisting stakeholders from politics, research, and business as well as education with a varity of services for more than 40 years and currently supports the funding measure CLIENT II content-wise and administratively in the fields of climate protection/energy efficiency, adaptation to climate change, and land management.
The three-year transnational joint research project DUB-GEM, coordinated by the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, is dedicated to the development of a drone-based remote sensing technique that allows for efficient identification and subsequent monitoring of radioactive residues in former uranium mining sites throughout Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The drone, which is presently being developed, will be equipped with a gammy spectrometry device, enabling it to record radioactively contaminated material that could find its way into the region's transboundary water bodies as a consequence of sudden natural events such as flooding and landslides considering the prevalence of erosion in the region. The objective of this extensive mapping effort is to assess the risk of such an uncontrolled discharge using a site-specific approach, thereby providing the basis for preventative measures of remediation, which are funded through the Environmental Remediation Account for Central Asia (ERA) by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
On the left: area that has been levelled in the course of remediation; Lake Issyk-Kul is visible in the background.
A sign cautions against radioactive residues of uranium mining.
The landscape's overall appearance is strongly influenced by processes of erosion.
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