Atmospheric transport modeling based estimation of radioactive release from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident

Abstract

As a consequence of the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on March 2011, it is important to characterize radioactivity release into the environment. Several isotopes, amongst others caesium-137 and iodine-131, are monitored at multiple stations throughout the world by the International Monitoring System of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. In this paper it is demonstrated how a worst case estimation of the radioactive release would contribute to the IMS signal. The sensitivity between source and receptor was determined using the Atmospheric Transport Modeling (ATM), running on the GRID computing facility of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) - Roma Tre. The simulations were compared with actual measurements

Estimation of the time-dependent radioactive source-term from the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident using atmospheric transport modelling

“…dry and wet deposition, resulted in a better estimation of the source-term than previously reported (Plastino et al, 2011). The scenario assuming a worst case situation suggests generally higher sourceterms, which are in reasonable agreement with the reported values (IAEA, 2011).…”

“…Nevertheless, a userdefined number of FLEXPART runs can be sent to a cluster (or grid) computer for parallel execution. FLEXPART was ported to a local cluster computer at the INFN and the Department of Physics of the University of Roma Tre Grid in order to be able to do multiple parallel runs with minimum time delay (Plastino et al, 2011). The porting on the Grid Infrastructure is in progress and will allow running the program on the geographically distributed nodes of the EUMEDGrid-Support Grid Infrastructure.…”

“…Preliminary results were reported at the 7th International Conference on Natural Computation (Plastino et al, 2011).…”