Real-time simulation of accidental passive transport of radioactive pollutant from a proposed nuclear power plant

Abstract

Power plant’s site selection is a complex task and involves through analyses of multi-disciplinary processes which are interlinked with each other. The site selection for nuclear power plants additionally requires an assessment of radiation doses to the environment and public during normal operation and in the case of an accident. This demands the problem of radioactive particles’ dispersion in atmosphere to be analysed in real time for a comprehensive set of radioactive release scenarios in prevailing meteorological conditions in the plant surroundings. In this study, a local scale atmospheric dispersion problem, considering a hypothetical accidental release (1 Bq s−1 of I-131) from a nuclear power plant is simulated with a combination of weather forecasting and particle dispersion codes on a multiprocessor computer system. The meteorological parameters are predicted with a weather research and forecasting (WRF) model and used in Lagrangian particle dispersion model based code FLEXPART to calculate the trajectory of released particles, and thereby, the estimation of spatial I-131 dose distribution. The concentration of particles and radiation doses were calculated for release heights of 10, 57, and 107 m and found in a reasonable agreement with the observed data and better than an earlier investigation done with regional atmospheric modelling system (RAMS) code. A comparison between the results of WRF and RAMS for various meteorological parameters revealed that better space–time predictions of wind speeds and directions by WRF had a profound effect on tracing the trajectories of particles and thereby the spatial dose distribution. The particles followed the changes in wind direction predicted by WRF that were known to prevail in the region.