Abstract
Consequences for Norway in case of a hypothetical accident in Sellafield nuclear site have been of concern for Norwegian authorities for some time now. A 33-year period with meteorological data and the dispersion model SNAP was used to find out the meteorological conditions for which atmospheric transport of radioactive debris from Sellafield nuclear site to Norway is the most efficient. This was done by running the SNAP model two times each day for the entire period and selecting the situations with maximum deposition to Norwegian territory. The worst case meteorological scenario for Norway in case of a hypothetical accident in Sellafield was found on 25th of June 1989. In this meteorological situation atmospheric transport to the west coast of Norway takes only 12 h. Based on the results of the SNAP runs, the probability of reaching Norway by radioactive pollution in case of an accident in Sellafield was also analysed. Such a probability is high (25–40%) for most of the Norwegian territory, except for the northern part and very high (over 40%) for the western coast of Norway.
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References
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority and to the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Radioactivity for the financial support of this. This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223268/F50.
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Questioner: Antti Hellsten.
Question: What was the reason to use source height 0–500 m? And did you test sensitivity to this choice?
Answer: The vertical range 0–500 m was suggested to us by the experts from Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority as most likely for a hypothetical accident at Sellafield site. We have not tested sensitivity of the results to the source height in this study, but we did it in the past. The main difference in results can be notices for the source below and above mixing height.
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Klein, H., Bartnicki, J. (2018). Worst Case Meteorological Scenario for Norway in Case of an Accident in Sellafield Nuclear Site. In: Mensink, C., Kallos, G. (eds) Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXV. ITM 2016. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57645-9_72
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57645-9_72
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