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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Kun-Su Lim, Chang-Lak Kim, Sanghwa Shin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1406-1415
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2031496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Determining whether to release a site after decommissioning a nuclear facility should be preceded by an environmental impact assessment of the exposure radiation dose according to the radionuclides in the soil. Currently, in Korea, various evaluation methodologies and decommissioning technologies are being studied for the first decommissioning of nuclear power plants, starting with Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit (Kori-1), which is based on the “Multi-Agency Radiation Survey and Site Investigation Manual MARSSIM” developed in the United States. The scope and evaluation targets of deep soil may differ depending on the purpose, but it has been confirmed that the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission are targeting subsurface soil. MARSSIM outlines the need for an evaluation of this subsurface soil but does not suggest specific methods. In NUREG-1757, which complements MARSSIM, it is confirmed that subsurface soil specifically means a soil layer that is 15 to 30 cm deep in the surface layer. In the current study, using the previously verified computational code RESidual RADioactivity (RESRAD)-ONSITE, a methodology for summation is proposed to evaluate the impact of subsurface soil more flexibly and realistically while minimizing the exposure dose evaluation procedure. When using RESRAD-ONSITE according to this evaluation methodology, it was confirmed that it is possible to respond to changes in the depths of various soil layers. In addition, it was also confirmed that this methodology is adaptable to the contamination of nuclides, such as 60Co, 137Cs, 152Eu, and 154Eu, which are expected to be major nuclides when decommissioning nuclear facilities.