Joint USNRC/EC consequence uncertainty study: The ingestion pathway, dosimetry and health effects expert judgment elicitations and results

摘要

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) and the European Commission (EC) have conducted a formal expert judgment elicitation jointly to systematically collect the quantitative information needed to perform consequence uncertainty analyses on a broad set of commercial nuclear power plants. Information from three sets of joint US/European expert panels was collected and processed. Information from the three sets of panels was collected in the following areas: in the phenomenological areas of atmospheric dispersion and deposition, in the areas of ingestion pathways and external dosimetry, and in the areas of health effects and internal dosimetry. This exercise has demonstrated that the uncertainty for particular issues as measured by the ratio of the 95th percentile to the 5th percentile can be extremely large (orders of magnitude), or rather small (factor of two). This information has already been used by many of the experts that were involved in this process in areas other than the consequence uncertainty field. The benefit to the field of radiological consequences is just beginning as the results of this study are published and made available to the consequence community.