Forest Wildfire at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in June, 2018: Lessons Learned from Coupling of Stationary and Mobile Monitoring with Predictive Modeling of Atmospheric Radioactivity During the Event and Follow-Up Intercomparison of the Modeling Tools
Abstract
At 55% of still unpopulated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) is covered by forests. A rather high public health concern in Kiev (located at 140 km from Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant - ChNPP) still exists for any wildfire events in the CEZ. Small increasing of the concentrations of Cs-137 in air in Kiev during the forest wildfires in the ChEZ could not provide dangerous radiation exposure doses for the population. Nevertheless, these events have a negative impact on the public health due to the psychological stresses after obtaining the information on the beginning of the wildfires in the CEZ. A "remedy " from such stresses can be real-time trustful forecasts.
The forecasting system for CEZ was developed within the set of the national and internationals projects by the implementation of the Lagrangian atmospheric dispersion model LEDI and real -time online decision support system for offsite nuclear emergency - RODOS, which development was funded by EU. The forecast of Atmospheric Dispersion Module (ADM) of RODOS are based on the numerical weather prediction model WRF for CEZ area on the grid 5*5 km. In addition to the ADM point source term model the specialized new tool for modeling radionuclide dispersion from the polygons of the fired areas was developed for CEZ using the Lagrangian model LASAT. The further improvements of the parametrization of the source term of Cs-137 during the forest fire in CEZ are doing within Japanese - Ukrainian project SATREPS by the intercomparison of the results of the listed above models with the Lagrangian model of Fukushima University. We describe the results of the real time testing of the developed modeling system during the forest wildfire that happens in 3 km zone at ChNPP 6-8 June 2018. The modeling system predicted the areas of localization of measurable concentrations of Cs-137 in air due to this wildfire at western suburb of Kiev, that was confirmed by the measurements of the mobile laboratory directed to this area. The following-up results of the intercomparison of model and measurements provided by the monitoring stationary networks and mobile samplers during wildfires demonstrated the significance of more comprehensive parametrization of the source terms for the accuracy of the forecasting in the short-ranges from the wildfires areas of the radioactive forests.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGH11A1032Z
- Keywords:
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- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 3390 Wildland fire model;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 4322 Health impact;
- NATURAL HAZARDS