Nuclear Processing Plant Research Articles

Limit Lines for Risk

Approaches to the regulation of risk from technological systems, such as nuclear power plants or chemical process plants, in which potential accidents may result in a broad range of adverse consequences must take into account several different aspects of risk. These include overall or average risk, accidents posing high relative risks, the rate at which accident probability decreases with increasing accident consequences, and the impact of high frequency, low consequence accidents. A hypothetical complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), with appropriately chosen parametric form, meets all these requirements. The Farmer limit line, by contrast, places limits on the risks due to individual accident sequences, and cannot adequately account for overall risk. This reduces its usefulness as a regulatory tool. In practice, the CCDF is used in the Canadian nuclear licensing process, while the Farmer limit line approach, supplemented by separate qualitative limits on overall risk, is employed in the United Kingdom.

Alpha-emitters in the environment II: Man-made activity

The largest source of inhaled α-activity in an industrial city arises from the burning of coal. Globally this releases 16 000 Ci per year into our immediate surroundings. The largest source of environmental man-made α-activity arose from H-bomb tests, which must have distributed many millions of curies over the globe. The most important source under our control arises from the part of the effluent from nuclear processing plants which is discharged into the sea. This is taken up by various organisms and may be ingested by man. Measurements have been made of the proportion of plutonium taken up by the edible shell fish Myrtilus edulis which passes through the gut into the livers of rats. Using Kodak LR115 detectors we have shown that not more than 0.2% of ingested plutonium will reach the liver.

Isolation and characterization of individual plutonium-bearing particles in atmospheric effluents from a nuclear processing plant.

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