On-site emergency intervention plan for nuclear accident situation at INR-Pitesti TRIGA reactor

A nuclear incident is defined as a series of events leading to release of radioactive materials into the environment of sufficient concentration to make necessary protective actions. The decision to initiate a protective action is a complex process. The benefits of taking the action is weighed against the involved risk and constraints. In addition the decision will be made under difficult emergency conditions, probably with little detailed information available. Therefore, considerable planing is necessary to reduce to manageable levels the types of decisions leading to effective responses to protect the public in the event of a nuclear incident. The sequence of events for developing emergency plans and responding to nuclear incidents will vary according to individual circumstances, because the international recommendations and site-specific emergency plans cannot provide detailed guidance for all accident scenarios and variations in local conditions. Flexibility must be maintained in emergency response to reflect the actual circumstances encountered (e.g. source term characteristics, the large number of possible weather conditions and environmental situation such as time of the day, season of the year, land use and soil types, population distribution and economic structures, uncertainties in the availability of technical and administrative support and the behaviour of the population). This further complicates the decision-making process, especially under accident conditions where there are time pressures and psychological stress. Therefore one the most important problems in the case of a nuclear emergency is quantifying all these very different types of off-site consequences. Last years, and in particular since the Chernobyl accident, there has been a considerable increase in the resources allocated to development of computerised systems which allow for predicting the radiological impact of accidents and to provide information in a manageable and effective form to evaluate alternative countermeasure strategies in the various stage of an accident. In this way, we have developed at INC Pitesti a computer code namely DOZIM which is presented. The structure of the emergency intervention plan, as objectives, general features and procedures is given. Each year there is organized at INR Pitesti an emergency intervention exercise for a nuclear accident situation at the TRIGA reactor. The main objective of such an exercise is to test the response capability in a nuclear accident situation for all the institutions and organizations from all levels as well as to test the implementation of specific procedures