Benchmarking of Fast-Running Software Tools Used to Model Releases During Nuclear Accidents

Abstract

Fukushima highlighted the importance of effective nuclear accident response. However, its complexity greatly impacted the ability to provide timely and accurate information to national and international stakeholders. Safety recommendations provided by different national and international organizations varied notably. Such differences can partially be attributed to different methods used in the initial assessment of accident progression and the amount of radioactivity release.Therefore, a comparison of methodologies was undertaken by the NEA/CSNIand its highlights are presented here. For this project, the prediction tools used by various emergency response organizations for estimating the source terms and public doses were examined. Those organizations that have a capability to use such toolsresponded to a questionnaire describing each code’s capabilities and main algorithms. Then the project’s participants analyzed five accident scenarios to predict the source term, dispersion of releases and public doses.