The importance of long range atmospheric transport in probabilistic accident consequence assessment

The disaster at the Chernobyl-4 reactor has demonstrated that severe nuclear accidents can give rise to significant radiological consequences several thousand kilometres from the source. The subsequent dispersion of the release over much of Western Europe further demonstrated the importance of synoptic scale weather patterns in determining the magnitude of the consequences of such accidents. A version of the MESOS-II European scale trajectory model, which is able to simulate large scale variations in weather conditions through the use of spatially and temporally variable meteorological input data, has been used to simulate the pattern of dispersion from Chernobyl with some success. This paper presents the results of probabilistic consequence assessments for a number of West European sites, made using the MESOS-II model. The results illustrate the effects, on probabilistic assessments, of using a more realistic treatment of long range atmospheric transport than the Gaussian plume model and also the spatial variation in the distributions of consequences arising from the variation in synoptic scale weather conditions across Western Europe