After Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, a demand for re-evaluation of emergency planning zones for nuclear facilities has emerged to ensure that in case of nuclear accident, the population, the environment and the property should lie in the safe zone. Emergency planning zones (EPZs) around a facility are the designated areas where protective measures are adopted according to predefined emergency plan for different emergency situations.
Deterministic and probabilistic approaches have been adopted to assess and design emergency planning zones for design base accidents (DBAs), however, after Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, multi-layer failure of the plant systems could not be ruled out. To estimate the dispersion of radioactive material and respective radiation doses received by the affected people, different techniques are used including on-field measurements through survey meters, on-line monitoring network and state-of the art codes for plume dispersion modeling.
In this study plume dispersion modeling and estimation of emergency planning zones has been carried out using plume dispersion code for hypothetical accident scenarios at a 10MW nuclear research reactor. Different accident scenarios were considered with different release characteristic and environmental conditions to study the affect of the parameters including release height, heat content, release time, atmospheric stability. The simulation results have been analyzed to assess the existing emergency planning zones of nuclear research reactor.
During a nuclear or radiological emergency, timely implementation of precautionary urgent protective actions, urgent protective actions, early protective actions, and other response actions is inevitable for the protection of the public and the emergency workers. unmanned aerial vehicles commonly known as drones have numerous applications including their use in disaster management for support in early warning, provision of medical aid, monitoring, situational awareness, taking various protective and response actions, and post-accident assessment. In the current study, in comparison to drone applications in response to other disasters, their potential use in response to a nuclear or radiological emergency has been discussed. The drones use in mapping radiation and contamination levels in Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents have already proved their applications in a nuclear or radiological emergency. It is concluded that drones inherently complement the existing disaster management arrangements and have the potential for their use in strengthening arrangements for taking protective and response actions in case of a nuclear or radiological emergency.
Distances for taking evacuation as a protective measure during early phase of a nuclear accident have been approximated using MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System (MACCS). As a reference data, the source term of Pakistan Research Reactor 1 (PARR-1) and meteorological data of Islamabad, Pakistan, have been considered. Based on comparison with published data and international radiological assessment (InterRAS) code results, it is concluded that MACCS is a rational tool for estimation of urgent protective actions during early phase of nuclear accident by taking into account the variations in meteorological and release concentrations parameters.
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