Agricultural countermeasure program - AGRICP: food and dose module in ARGOS- accident reporting and Guidance Operational System

Nuclear or radiological emergencies can affect food, feed and commodities grown. The regulatory bodies has a role in the post-accident phase instructing the population regarding the consumption of agricultural products, monitoring and recovering the contaminated areas and disposing the generated waste. To deal with nuclear/radiological emergencies, in the end of 2007, Brazil took part of the ARGOS consortium. ARGOS is a software used for support the Preparedness and Response of a nuclear emergency. Specifically for use during the recovery phase, ARGOS has a module called AgriCP (Agricultural Countermeasure Program). This functionality was add to the version 9.0 of ARGOS, in 2012, replacing FMD (Food and Dose Module) model. AgriCP can be very useful in the post-accident phasing, helping to planning the actions that must be taken, saving human and budged resources. However, most of the parameters used by default for the model are specific for Central Europe and must be adapted to the Brazilian characteristics. In this paper the basic functionalities of AgriCP are presented and a general view of the issues to be addressed while implementing AgriCP for the Brazilian case is given. Besides the lack of specific parameters for the Brazilian reality, the definition of the area to be considering for intervention in an accident, taking into account the very complex meteorological characteristic of the Brazilian NPPs (nuclear power plants) site, are some of the matters of concern. (author)