A nuclear emergency partition evacuation framework based on comprehensive risk assessment

Abstract

Nuclear power has incomparable advantages over traditional fossil energy and has become one of major power sources. Meanwhile, the huge losses in nuclear accidents place higher requirements for emergency response. Nuclear emergency evacuation is an effective protective measure to prevent or reduce the public’s exposure to radioactive materials. However, nuclear emergency evacuation is affected by a variety of factors, including environment, resources, transportation, and radiation, etc. It is difficult for decision makers to analyze a large amount of complex information so as to design effective nuclear emergency evacuation schemes. Considering the potential risk and characteristics of emergency traffic evacuation, a partition evacuation framework based on risk assessment is proposed in this paper. First, to deal with nuclear radiation and traffic evacuation vulnerability, a comprehensive risk assessment method is put forward that can be used for potential risk quantification during nuclear emergency evacuation. Second, according to the risk assessment results, this paper proposes a partition evacuation organization strategy and a cell transmission model (CTM) to minimize the exposure risk of during nuclear emergency evacuation. Finally, taking a coastal nuclear power plant in China as the research object, extensive and in-depth analysis is performed. As suggested by the simulation results, the partition evacuation strategy we proposed could effectively reduce the exposure risk by 36.0% and the average delay is shortened by 50.4%. Compared with traditional evacuation strategies, our framework is useful for increasing the nuclear emergency evacuation efficiency and alleviating traffic congestion.