Abstract
Determination of a source term of an accidental release of radioactive material into the atmosphere is very important for evaluating emergency situations and their consequences. However, knowledge of the source term and its composition is typically vague and uncertain. One possible way to obtain the source term is inverse modeling in which an atmospheric transport model is combined with field measurements. The most accessible measurements are those from gamma dose rate (GDR) detectors. However, GDR measurements represent a sum of contribution from all nuclides from both plume and deposition which makes the problem particularly difficult. The same difficulty arises when the measurements can not distinguish contribution from another species in the release, such as nuclides attached to different particle sizes. We propose a Bayesian method for recovery of the source term from GDR measurements where a priori knowledge on ratios of different species is given in the form of bounds. This knowledge is incorporated into the model of covariance matrix of the source term. The Bayesian methodology allows to handle uncertain knowledge on the nuclide ratios as well as unknown temporal correlations of the source term. We evaluate and compare the proposed method with other state‐of‐the‐art methods on a twin experiment of a non‐stationary release of 16 nuclides from the Czech nuclear power plant Temelin being registered by the Austrian GDR monitoring network. Real‐world validation of the approach is performed on the latest measurements of concentration and deposition of caesium‐137 from the Chernobyl accident, where we estimate composition of the source term from different particle sizes (species). The estimated source term is in very good agreement with previously reported results and the calculated species ratios are supported by the available observations.
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More From: Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
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