Radiation risk assessment to the public from a prospective nuclear power plant at Kasato village, Buyende district in eastern Uganda

Abstract

Uganda plans to incorporate nuclear energy into it's energy mix by 2031 to boost the growing energy demands for the country. In the course of nuclear energy development, regulatory licensing and public acceptance play a pivotal role in the success of this programme. This paper conducted the risk assessment to the public from the normal operations or anticipated operational occurrences of the nuclear power plant (NPP) at Kasato village in Buyende District. The 37 gaseous effluents from the APR1400 reactor technology, food consumption rates, 30 years hourly weather data, breathing rates for three age groups were input to the GENII (Second-generation environmental dosimetry) code, which computed the annual effective doses, individual cancer risk and cancer fatalities. The research findings indicated that the annual effective doses for each age group were less than the country's regulatory limit for public exposure of 1 mSv per annum. The individual cancer risk for infants, children and adults living at 3 km away from the NPP site were computed as 2.1×10−8 , 4.2×10−8 and 4.2×10−9 respectively and were less than the Ugandan cancer incidences of 5.0×10−4, 5.0×10−4, and 0.122. In addition, the cancer fatalities in infants, children and adults of 1.4×10−8, 9.4×10−9 and 3.1×10−9 respectively were within the NPP safety goal of having contribution to cancer mortality below 0.1 %. In conclusion, the deployment the NPP in Buyende District has negligible health risks to the members of the public.