Near-field krypton-85 measurements in stable meteorological conditions around the AREVA NC La Hague reprocessing plant: estimation of atmospheric transfer coefficients

Combining short-range dispersion simulations with fine-scale meteorological ensembles: probabilistic indicators and evaluation during a 85Kr field campaign

“…This is especially true for Doury standard deviations, which simulate a very narrow plume on the vertical, resulting in an underestimation of ground concentrations in the case of elevated release. This was specifically shown in the case of La Hague RP (Connan et al, 2014;Korsakissok et al, 365 2016). At LRC station (Fig.…”

“…The IRSN routinely monitors 85 Kr air concentrations close to the RP to study the transfer of radionuclides in the environment, but also to validate the atmospheric dispersion models and improve the understanding of radionuclides dispersion in various atmospheric conditions (Maro et al, 2002(Maro et al, , 2007Leroy et al, 2010;Connan et al, 2014). 85 Kr is a very good tracer of atmospheric dispersion in short and medium distances since it is an inert gas (noble gas), which means it does not generate chemical or physical reactions, so it does not get depleted by rain (wet scavenging) or by dry deposition processes.…”

Combining short-range dispersion simulations with fine-scale meteorological ensembles: probabilistic indicators and evaluation during a 85Kr field campaign

“…Background levels of 85 Kr in the atmosphere, excluding an industrial plume, are currently below 2 Bq m −3 (Bollhöfer et al, 2019). Within 2 km of the La Hague RP, air activity concentrations of 85 Kr can reach 100 000 Bq m −3 (Connan et al, 2014). At distances in the order of 20 km, the maximum measurable activity concentrations are generally less than 10 000 Bq m −3 and beyond a few tens of kilometers of RP; the activities in 85 Kr are too low to be measurable in real time (Connan et al, 2013).…”

Development toward a double focusing isotopic separator for noble gas isotope enrichment

“…Radioactive isotopes of noble gases are considered as powerful and sensitive tracers for environmental studies. In particular, 85 Kr (half‐life 10.76 years), 39 Ar (269 years) and 81 Kr (229,000 years) have been used for age dating of groundwaters and polar ice sheets, for studying transport processes in the oceans, and the atmosphere, for monitoring nuclear fuel reprocessing activities and for checking 85 Kr radioactivity in solar neutrino detector systems …”

“…Radioactive isotopes of noble gases are considered as powerful and sensitive tracers for environmental studies. In particular, 85 Kr (half-life 10.76 years), 39 Ar (269 years) and 81 Kr (229,000 years) have been used for age dating of groundwaters [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] and polar ice sheets, [9] for studying transport processes in the oceans, [10,11] and the atmosphere, for monitoring nuclear fuel reprocessing activities [12][13][14] and for checking 85 Kr radioactivity in solar neutrino detector systems. [15,16] Because of their chemical inertness, noble gases have the great advantage to be easily extracted with high efficiency from a large quantity of environmental samples (atmosphere, water, ice).…”