Severe Nuclear Reactor Accidents Likely Every 10 to 20 Years - New Max Planck Institute Study

[kristopher]

19. Here is what the authors say

By integrating over a year we capture the annual range ofmeteorological conditions, thus providing a stochastic representation of the atmospheric transport and deposition pathways, accounting for the different seasons. During an actual accident the total deposition likely occurs over a much shorter time period, as was the case with the Chernobyl reactor. To assess the effect of individual accidents onewould need to simulate the actual emissions and meteorological conditions in a deterministic approach (http://flexrisk.boku.ac.at/). Such calculations can be performed when theemissions and meteorological conditions are known, which has been done for Chernobyl and needs to be done for Fukushima. For our risk calculations the total deposition overall meteorological conditions is relevant, rather than the actual time period of any individual accident. For this reason we assess the contamination risk per year in Sect. 4. To illustrate the intra-annual variability, we also present monthly contamination risk maps in Sect. 4 by assuming that the same emission occurs within one month rather than one year. Fur-thermore, in Sect. 6 we test our approach by comparing thecontinuous annual simulations with those in which we re-lease the radioactivity in weekly periods for two selected locations.
J. Lelieveld et al.: Global risk of radioactive fallout p.4247