Evaluation of collective doses on the European scale arising from atmospheric discharges

The aim of this work is the calculation of annual collective doses received by the population of the European Community as a result of routine atmospheric releases from a nuclear plant. The annual release is broken down into 12-hour steps and the calculation carried out for each of these steps. Summing the contribution from each step allow: one to calculate the time integrated annual atmospheric concentration in each point of a grid covering Western Europe. The collective doses due to external irradiation and to inhalation are then obtained by superimposing the population distribution over the same area. The computer model comprises the following three steps: Calculation of the trajectories followed by the polluant, derived from the meteorological data; the individual trajectories do not follow a straight line as they are corrected every 6 hours. Calculation of the atmospheric concentrations associated with those trajectories. Calculation of the collective doses from external irradiation and from inhalation, using the population grid. This computer model is applied to hypothetical discharges of 85Kr, 13+H1I, and 239Pu, from the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay for the years 1975 and 1976. The comparison of the results obtained from the three radionuclides allows one to assess the influence of the radioactive half-life and of the dry deposition effects on the collective doses. The results were also compared to those obtained using the usual model in which the pollutant trajectory is a straight line. Finally: the releases were classified according to the wind direction at the point of emission in order to study the variation of the collective dose as a function of that parameter. (H.K.)