Abstract
Radioactive aerosols harmful to humans are often produced in nuclear accidents, and their source term characteristics (total volume and particle size distribution) and dispersion patterns have important implications for accident response and hazard assessment. However, experimental studies of radioactive aerosols cannot be directly conducted in open space due to the hazardous nature of radioactive aerosols. In this study, silver was used instead of plutonium to study the aerosol source term under different specific internal energy inputs (SIEI) to simulate a low order explosion in an accident. Results show that aerosol release fraction (ARF) and respirable release fraction (RRF) of silver increase linearly with SIEI first, then varies in a range of 8% ~ 19%, with a turning point at SIEI of 1.4 MJ/kg. Analysis suggests an increase of difference between ARF and RRF with respect to SIEI. The size distribution of silver aerosol around 10 µm is influenced by SIEI significantly, which could be possibly attributed to the interactions between silver aerosol and ambient aerosol (solid HE products or rust). Comparison between the source term of silver and plutonium suggests that silver is a good surrogate of plutonium in studying aerosol for SIEI of MJ/kg level.
Highlights
Radioactive aerosols harmful to humans are often produced in nuclear accidents, and their source term characteristics and dispersion patterns have important implications for accident response and hazard assessment
The mass concentration-size distribution is given by dcAg/ dlogAD, according to the aerodynamic diameter (AD) intervals in each sampling stage, where cAg is the mass concentration of silver aerosol calculated by ms/Vs. ms is the mass of silver aerosol collected in a certain AD range, and is the average of four Anderson samplers (The original mass of silver results for each sample could be found in the supplementary Table S1)
A series of high explosive (HE) detonation devices were reasonably designed under the guidance of numerical simulations, and data on the total silver aerosol mass concentration and mass concentration-size distribution of silver with AD below 10 μm are obtained through the in-situ sampling technique in the explosion room
Summary
Radioactive aerosols harmful to humans are often produced in nuclear accidents, and their source term characteristics (total volume and particle size distribution) and dispersion patterns have important implications for accident response and hazard assessment. A serial of HE detonation devices supplying certain internal energy to the silver shell inside are designed to explore relationship between SIEI and aerosol source term through experiments.
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