Application of an environmental impact assessment methodology to a site discharging low levels of radioactivity to a freshwater environment in Norway

Abstract

Significant shifts in opinion regarding environmental protection from ionising radiation have resulted in the development and availability of bespoke approaches for the assessment of impacts on wildlife from radioactive contaminants. The application of such assessment methodologies to actual situations, however, remains relatively limited. This paper describes the implementation of the ERICA Integrated Approach and associated tools within the context of routine discharges of radioactive materials to a freshwater environment. The article follows the implementation through its relevant stages and discusses strengths and weaknesses of the approach in relation to the case study. For current discharge levels, 137Cs and 60Co constitute the main dose contributors to the majority of reference organisms studied, although 241Am and 3H are the main contributors for the phyto- and zooplankton categories. Patterns are observed depending on whether the reference organism is sediment-associated or not. At current discharge levels, none of the reference organisms exceeded or approached the selected screening level, and impacts on biota could be regarded as negligible.

On the application of an environmental radiological assessment system to an anthropomorphic surrogate

“…For wildlife, the identification of a unique distance is less evident because we are often concerned with various populations (Copplestone et al ), characterized by different types of organisms exhibiting distinctive life histories. As elaborated on by Hosseini et al (), the selection of a distance should ideally be organism‐specific (cf. sessile organism such as mollusk to a mobile organism such as fish) and should also account for the spatial averaging in exposures that may occur as the organism moves within the environment being considered.…”

“…As a further step in moving toward assessing the practicability of this integration goal, it is appropriate to examine, compare, and critically contrast various facets of the methodologies applied in human and environmental assessments, issues that are elaborated further on in the present work. The ERICA Integrated Approach (Larsson ) has been widely applied in environmental impact assessments required for authorized discharges (Hosseini et al ; Nedveckaite et al ) and radioactive waste disposal (Robinson et al ). Within ERICA, environmental risk is quantified by calculating exposure for nonhuman biota using data on environmental transfer and dosimetry.…”