Eta-CALPUFF Meteorological Plume Analysis to Determine Potential Casualties Due to Catastrophic Failures at US/Canada Border Nuclear Power Plants

摘要

Industrial facilities in bordering nations, Canada and Mexico, pose a potential security and health risk to the Continental United States (CONUS). These sites which include chemical facilities and nuclear power plants pose a severe health risk in the event of catastrophic failure due to their proximity to United States (US) civilian populations. An estimate for the initial plume release and spread from a catastrophic failure at a US/Canada nuclear power plants is estimated with meteorological plume analysis. The modeling system consists of a “hybrid modeling system” in which the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Eta model, a prognostic model, is used as input to create diagnostic wind fields with the California Meteorological Model (CALMET) for the California Puff Model (CALPUFF). For the year 2004, EDAS (Eta 40 km with Data Assimilation) model data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) archive were examined to choose cases with prevailing winds blowing towards United States populations. CALMET and CALPUFF were used with this Eta data set to estimate plume spread for the worst-case scenarios. Populations exposed to various concentration levels of radioactive or chemical agents as predicted with CALPUFF were estimated by using the Gridded Population Database of the World (GPW), a management tool developed by various universities and agencies.