Xenon-133 and caesium-137 releases into the atmosphere from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant: determination of the source term, atmospheric dispersion, and deposition

By Andreas Stohl, P. Seibert, G. Wotawa, D. Arnold, John F. Burkhart, S. Eckhardt, C. Tapia, A. Vargas, T. Yasunari. 2011

669 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On 11 March 2011, an earthquake occurred about 130 km off the Pacific coast of Japan's main island Honshu, followed by a large tsunami. The resulting loss of electric power at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant de- veloped into a disaster causing massive release of radioac- tivity into the atmosphere. In this study, we determine the emissions into the atmosphere of two isotopes, the noble gas xenon-133 ( 133 Xe) and the aerosol-bound caesium-137 ( 137 Cs), which have very different release characteristics as well as behavior in the atmosphere. To determine radionu- clide emissions as a function of height and time until 20 April, we made a first guess of release rates based on fuel inventories and documented accident events at the site. This first guess was subsequently improved by inverse modeling, which combined it with the results of an atmospheric trans- port model, FLEXPART, and measurement data from several dozen stations in Japan, North America and other regions. We used both atmospheric activity concentration measure- ments as well as, for 137 Cs, measurements of bulk deposi- tion. Regarding 133 Xe, we find a total release of 15.3 (un- certainty range 12.2-18.3) EBq, which is more than twice as high as the total release from Chernobyl and likely the largest radioactive noble gas release in history. The entire noble gas inventory of reactor units 1-3 was set free into the atmo- sphere between 11 and 15 March 2011. In fact, our release estimate is higher than the entire estimated 133 Xe inventory

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Radiation, Radiological and Ultrasound Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8b0f7446a1ae511f0450e965aa9132e52908d44

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Radiation

I. Pisso

In Radiological and Ultrasound Technology

Citations in the corpus

The Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART version 10.4 (2017, methodology): “2, we compare modelled e-folding lifetimes from a number of FLEXPART simulations, using different model versions, and switching off in-cloud and below-cloud scavenging in FLEXPART v10.3 with measured lifetimes. The parameter settings in FLEXPART used for these comparisons were the 10 same as used by”
Atmospheric inverse modeling with known physical bounds: an example from trace gas emissions (2013, background): “This distribution should create new realizations that are sufficiently different from the previous one such that the algorithm effectively samples the entire probability space.”
Radioactivity release from the Fukushima accident and its consequences: A review (2014, methodology): “The sources of the meteorological data for different studies were as follows: the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NECP) Global Forecast System (GFS) (Stohl et al., 2012a; Achim et al., 2012), ECMWF and the Meteo-France ”
The Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART-WRF version 3.1 (2013, background): “…Version Interactive Discussion D iscussion P aper | D iscussion P aper | D iscussion P aper | D iscussion P aper | Warneke et al., 2009; Hirdman et al., 2010) and radionuclides (e.g. Stohl et al., 2012), to the quantification of stratosphere troposphere exchange (e.g. Stohl et al., 2003a).”
Source term estimation using air concentration measurements and a Lagrangian dispersion model – Experiments with pseudo and real cesium-137 observations from the Fukushima nuclear accident (2015, methodology): “segments are a posteriori results by Stohl et al. (2012). cp is obtained using Equation (6) where the previously computed H replaced the need to re-run the HYSPLIT model.”
Estimation of Errors in the Inverse Modeling of Accidental Release of Atmospheric Pollutant: Application to the Reconstruction of the Cesium-137 and Iodine-131 Source Terms from the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant (2012, methodology): “Even if the available data (activity concentration data as used in this study, but also deposition data and gamma dose rate within the NPP site) clearly indicate releases between 19 March and 21 March, it may be surprising to retrieve such a high peak on 20 March, as an emergency cooling process has”