Population protection in case of radiation accident as a part of the national defense concept

The paper deals with the present situation and the problems of the system for early warning in case of radiation accidents in Bulgaria. There are multiple data acquisition sites belonging to five institutions in Bulgaria that have relation to the early warning, but no coordination between them, large time delays in receiving the data, no unification, no possibility of quick correlation with the meteorological conditions for further forecasts. The underestimated organization and methodology problems for the sake of expensive radionuclide detection equipment supply hinder the second stage of population protection - environmental radioactivity status assessment. The third stage - assessment of the radiation doses received by the population groups - has not been practically build up. The authors consider the major problems of the early warning system in Bulgaria to be: information-and-communications; lack of a common center, resulting in bad coordination and decision making; considerable impact of the human factor on radiation protection as a result of low automatization; lack of a uniform concept of national radiation protection. The following suggestions for improvement made are: necessary unification of the equipment, reliable information channels, common center for analysis. According to the authors, only the problems concerning Kozloduy NPP are currently in a process of solution, while the detection and the analysis of possible transborder migration of radionuclides is still not in the agenda. For the sake of comparison the general features and the organization of the US system ARAC for emergency radiation accident detection and warning are presented. ARAC reaction to the Chernobyl accident and the upgrades performed in this system. (R.Ts.)