Processing of foodstuffs as countermeasures following a nuclear accident

The processing of foodstuffs is one of the countermeasures which may be taken following a nuclear accident in order to reduce the contamination of the foodstuffs concerned. A consideration of the transfer of radioactivity during the processing or the preparation of food makes it possible to estimate the effectiveness of the countermeasure concerned, which is one essential criterion for its selection; the other is the cost of its application. In short, consideration must be given at the same time to both of these factors if a rational choice is to be made between the various potential options on an industrial scale. In addition to the countermeasures involving processing or culinary preparation of the foodstuffs concerned, they may also be destroyed, stored, used as feedingstuffs or decontaminated, and the crops may be buried, the feedingstuffs of animals changed, farmland frozen, etc. An expert system using the GOLDWORKS software should help to select the most appropriate countermeasure on the basis of its cost and effectiveness. Such a system would evaluate: - the effectiveness of each of the countermeasures likely to be selected (to be expressed in terms of dose); - the social cost of the dose avoided by their application; - the cost of the countermeasure itself. The last is estimated as thoroughly as possible by taking into account, inter alia, food processing, compensation to the producers, the costs of transport and storage or of destruction. This is followed by a proposed classification of the countermeasures according to their cost effectiveness. 17 radionuclides and 4 foodstuffs (milk, meat, green vegetables and cereals) are considered. Depending on the date of the accident concerned, the input data for themodel are produced from the concentrations measured in the foodstuffs or in the soil. In the latter case, dynamic transfer coefficients make it possible to evaluate the contamination of future harvests