MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System (MACCS)

This report describes the MACCS computer code. The purpose of this code is to simulate the impact of severe accidents at nuclear power plants on the surrounding environment. MACCS has been developed for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to replace the previous CRAC2 code, and it incorporates many improvements in modeling flexibility in comparison to CRAC2. The principal phenomena considered in MACCS are atmospheric transport, mitigative actions based on dose projection, dose accumulation by a number of pathways including food and water ingestion, early and latent health effects, and economic costs. The MACCS code can be used for a variety of applications. These include (1) probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) of nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, (2) sensitivity studies to gain a better understanding of the parameters important to PRA, and (3) cost-benefit analysis. This report is composed of three volumes. This document, Volume 1, the Users's Guide, describes the input data requirements of the MACCS code and provides directions for its use as illustrated by three sample problems