Benchmarking of computer codes and approaches for modeling exposure scenarios

Abstract

Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Under DOE idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-761D01570 a. Westinghouse Hanford Co. b. Westinghouse Savannah River Co. DISCLAIMER Portions of this document may be illegible in electronic image products. Images are produced from the best available original document.

RESRAD benchmarking against six radiation exposure pathway models

“…This section summarizes a benchmarking effort to compare results from RESRAD with those of the PATHRAE and GENII computer codes. The results of PATHFtAE and GENII were taken directly from a paper presented at the 1992 Waste Manageiment Symposium (Seitz et al 1992) in which the authors compared the PATHRAE and GENII computer codes.…”

“…In the paper by Seitz et al (1992), an intruder scenario was assumed, and the calculational results for three exposure pathwaysexternal gamma, dust inhalation, and plant food ingestionwere compared. Because the meat and milk pathways involve more complicated food chain analyses, the methodologies implemented in different computer codes to calculate annual doses vary considerably.…”

“…Because the meat and milk pathways involve more complicated food chain analyses, the methodologies implemented in different computer codes to calculate annual doses vary considerably. Therefore, annual doses from these two pathways were not compared in the Seitz et al (1992) paper. Because the intrusion scenario considered did not involve a groundwater contribution, leaching of contaminants from the waste site was not taken into account, and that feature of RESRAD was disabled for these comparisons.…”

“…The produce consumption rate listed in Table 26 can be represented by the fruits, vegetables, and grain consumption rate parameter i n the RESRAD code. Seitz et al (1992) assumed that 25% of the consumed food was contaminated, (i.e., was from the contaminated site). The version of the RESRAD code used in this study has a built-in capability to automatically estimate the fraction of consumed food grown on-site.…”

“…The second type of benchmark analysis, as described in Section 3, involved comparison of RESRAD results with published results for the GENII and PAT--EPA codes (Seitz et al 1992(Seitz et al , 1994. The parameter values used in RESRAD were adapted according to the published descriptions for GENII and PATHFLAE-EPA so that a similar scenario was simulated by the three different computer codes.…”