Global Radioxenon Emission Inventory from Nuclear Power Plants for the Calendar Year 2014
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Pure and Applied Geophysics
Global Radioxenon Emission Inventory from Nuclear Power Plants for the Calendar Year 2014 MARTIN B. KALINOWSKI1 Abstract—For the purpose of monitoring for compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), the International Monitoring System (IMS) is being established that includes 40 sensor systems for atmospheric xenon radioactivity. Its purpose is to monitor the atmosphere for signatures that may indicate a nuclear explosion. Normal operational releases of radioxenon from nuclear facilities can regularly be observed by these very high-sensitive noble gas systems. Existing best estimates of releases for a generic year are unlikely to apply for any specific year at the level of individual facilities because their releases are highly variable and can change by several orders of magnitude from year to year. In this paper, best knowledge of the radioxenon emission inventory from nuclear power plants (NPPs) is collected for the calendar year 2014. The distribution function for each CTBT relevant radioxenon isotope is derived from all releases from NPPs as reported for 2014. The data of this paper can be used for developing and validating methods based on atmospheric transport modelling that are designed to enhance understanding of the impact of known sources on the IMS background observations. Keywords: CTBT, radioxenon, emission inventory, radionuclide monitoring, atmospheric radioactivity.
1. Introduction Radioactive xenon isotopes provide the most likely observable radioactive signatures of underground nuclear explosions (Kalinowski 2011). A global monitoring system for atmospheric xenon radioactivity is being established as part of the International Monitoring System (IMS) to verify compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-020-02579-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. 1
Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive NuclearTest-Ban-Treaty Organization, Provisional Technical Secretariat, VIC, P.O. Box 1200, 1400 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]
and HALIT TATLISU1 Ban Treaty (CTBT). The atmospheric concentrations of 135Xe, 133mXe, 133Xe and 131mXe are measured. This paper focusses on the radioxenon emission from nuclear power plants (NPP) which are measured frequently at IMS stations. Depending on the IMS location, NPPs contribute between zero and 80% of all observed radioxenon concentrations (Achim et al. 2016). Other papers cover the release of radioxenon from nuclear research reactors (Kalinowski et al. 2020) and medical isotope production facilities (Gueibe et al. 2017) in the year 2014. A few medical isotope production facilities (MIPFs) are the strongest sources but all NPPs together contribute as much as one strong MIPF (Kalinowski et al. 2014). Radioxenon is released continuously from NPPs at low level during normal operation cycles as gaseous effluent into the atmosphere from the reactor, turbine a
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