Calculation of absorbed doses to water pools in severe accident sequences

A methodology is presented for calculating the radiation dose to a water pool from the decay of uniformly distributed nuclides in that pool. Motivated by the need to accurately model radiolysis reactions of iodine, direct application is made to fission product sources dissolved or suspended in containment sumps or pools during a severe nuclear reactor accident. Two methods of calculating gamma absorption are discussed - one based on point-kernal integration and the other based on Monte Carlo techniques. Using least-squares minimization, the computed results are used to obtain a correlation that relates absorbed dose to source energy and surface-to-volume ratio of the pool. This correlation is applied to most relevant fission product nuclides and used to actually calculate transient sump dose rate in a pressurized-water reactor (PWR) severe accident sequence