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Comparison between modelling and measurement of marine dispersion, environmental half-time and 137Cs inventories after the Fukushima Daiichi accident

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Abstract

Contamination of the marine environment following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (FDNPP) represents the most important influx of artificial radioactivity released into the sea ever recorded. The evaluation, in near real time, of the total amount of radionuclide released at sea and of the residence time in coastal waters were ones of challenges for nuclear authorities during this event. In the framework of a crisis situation, a numerical hydrodynamical model has been built and used ‘as is’. The concomitant use of this numerical model and in situ data allows the comparison of the simulated and measured environmental half-times. A tuning of the wind drag coefficient has been nevertheless necessary to reproduce the evolution of measured inventories of 137Cs and 134Cs between April and June 2011. After tuning, the relative mean absolute error between measured and simulated concentrations for the 849 measurements in the dataset is 69 %, while the relative bias indicates a model underestimation of 4 %. These results confirm the estimates of the source term, i.e. 27 PBq (12–41 PBq) for direct releases and 3 PBq for atmospheric deposition onto the sea. The parameters applied here to simulate atmospheric deposition onto the sea are within the correct order of magnitude for reproducing seawater concentrations. Quantitative inventories of tracers which integrate dispersion and transport processes are useful to test model reliability. It exhausts the model sensibility to meteorological forcing, which remains difficult to appraise to reproduce mid- to long-term transport.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express all our sympathy to the Japanese people affected by the consequences of the tsunami and the FDNPP accident.

We are particularly grateful to all persons contributing to the collection and measurement of seawater samples under difficult conditions.

We also thank the persons and institutes responsible for providing, compiling and checking thousands of measurements: Mireille Arnaud, Olivier Connan, Celine Duffa, Vanessa Parache, Tina Odaka, Pauline Defenouillère and Léna Thomas, ‘Centre Technique de Crise’ staff of the French Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety, MEXT and TEPCO for Internet publication of the concentration data collected in the environment, which were used in the present study.

We also thank the MERCATOR-OCEAN consortium for providing initial and boundary conditions from its Ocean Global Circulation Model.

We thank two anonymous reviewers for useful comments to improve the manuscript.

Michael S.N. Carpenter post-edited the English style.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), PRP-ENV/SERIS/LRC, Cherbourg-Octeville, France

    Pascal Bailly du Bois & Philippe Laguionie

  2. Institut Français de Recherches et d’Etudes sur la Mer (IFREMER), DYNECO, Brest, France

    Pierre Garreau

  3. Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), PRP-SESUC/BMTA, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France

    Irène Korsakissok

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  1. Pascal Bailly du Bois
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  2. Pierre Garreau
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  3. Philippe Laguionie
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  4. Irène Korsakissok
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Correspondence to Pascal Bailly du Bois.

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Responsible Editor: Martin Verlaan

This article is part of the Topical Collection on the 16th biennial workshop of the Joint Numerical Sea Modelling Group (JONSMOD) in Brest, France 21-23 May 2012

Electronic supplementary materials

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

ESM 1

(A) Database of all seawater measurements carried out up to June 2012 (XLS 11916 kb)

ESM 2

Animations with daily comparison of the model outputs (background, coloured plumes) with measurements (foreground, coloured dots in squares). (B) mid-distance from the FDNPP.

(GIF 9.34 MB)

ESM 3

(C) Long distance from the FDNPP.

(GIF 9574 KB)

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Bailly du Bois, P., Garreau, P., Laguionie, P. et al. Comparison between modelling and measurement of marine dispersion, environmental half-time and 137Cs inventories after the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Ocean Dynamics 64, 361–383 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-013-0682-5

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