Research on Optimization of Ingestion Emergency Planning Zone Sizing

Food contamination has aroused public concern since Fukushima accident. As emergency preparedness is often viewed as an important approach to protect staff working on site and public around the site, ingestion emergency planning zone (EPZ) is applied to protect public from the exposure of contaminated food. Ingestion EPZ is one of the technical foundations for nuclear emergency preparedness, which will be influenced by design features of plant and characteristics of the site. This paper is devoted to the research on the optimization of ingestion EPZ sizing from the view of the atmospheric dispersion model and the food chain model, which are crucial points for the sizing of ingestion EPZ. Compared to the traditional straight-line Gaussian plume model with a quite conservative assumption that plume segments always transport in the downwind direction, the Lagrangian Gaussian puff model considers the swing of wind direction over time, which makes the simulation more realistic. With the results of radionuclide concentrations evaluated by the dispersion model, the transportation of the radionuclides in food is simulated by the food chain model. The traditional food chain model is essentially a static model with no consideration that food contamination level has a strong dependence on the accident date, which may overstate the risk from nuclear plant accidents and result in unfounded fear of public. The dynamic food chain model, which takes daily changes of plant biomass, or livestock feeding periods in consideration, has been developed to estimate radionuclide concentrations in different foodstuffs. On basis of the study of the dispersion models and food chain models above, we evaluate the ingestion EPZ size of Tianwan NPP by choosing the comparatively realistic ones from them. In the scenario considered in this paper, the simulation domain of Tianwan NPP within 80km-range and hourly time-step is applied, and meteorological conditions are carefully set according to observation data in recent years. Results show that there is significant margin and conservatism in the traditional ingestion EPZ sizing. Radionuclide concentrations predicted by the Lagrangian Gaussian puff model is almost an order of magnitude lower than the Gaussian plume model. Moreover, the dynamic food chain model considers the seasonal effect that simulation results of radionuclide concentrations in foodstuffs are significantly higher in summer than in winter, which helps to make a more realistic consideration of ingestion pathway. This research gives an example of the application of new models for the optimization of ingestion EPZ sizing, which may contribute to strengthen public confidence in nuclear safety and emergency preparedness.