• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.114-129
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• 2017

Background: The purpose of this paper is to confirm the event timings and the magnitude of fission product aerosol release from the Fukushima accident. Over a few hundreds of technical papers have been published on the environmental impact of Fukushima Daiichi accident since the accident occurred on March 11, 2011. However, most of the research used reverse or inverse method based on the monitoring of activities in the remote places and only few papers attempted to estimate the release of fission products from individual reactor core or from individual spent fuel pool. Severe accident analysis code can be used to estimate the radioactive release from which reactor core and from which radionuclide the peaks in monitoring points can be generated. Materials and Methods: The basic material used for this study are the initial core inventory obtained from the report JAEA-Data/Code 2012-018 and the given accident scenarios provided by Japanese Government or Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in official reports. In this research a forward method using severe accident progression code is used as it might be useful for justifying the results of reverse or inverse method or vice versa. Results and Discussion: The release timing and amounts to the environment are estimated for volatile radioactive fission products such as noble gases, cesium, iodine, and tellurium up to 184 hours (about 7.7 days) after earthquake occurs. The in-plant fission product behaviors and release characteristics to environment are estimated using the severe accident progression analysis code, MELCOR, for Fukushima Daiichi accident. These results are compared with other research results which are summarized in UNSCEAR 2013 Report and other technical papers. Also it may provide the physically based arguments for justifying or suspecting the rationale for the scenarios provided in open literature. Conclusion: The estimated results by MELCOR code simulation of this study indicate that the release amount of volatile fission products to environment from Units 1, 2, and 3 cores is well within the range estimated by the reverse or inverse method, which are summarized in UNSCEAR 2013 report. But this does not necessarily mean that these two approaches are consistent.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.44-51
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• 2012

It is more important to realize safety management, medium-large accident prevention and risk prediction as accident of industry facilities can generate enormous physical and human damage because most energy plant might handle toxic substance. Especially, atmospheric dispersion system, which is able to simulate situation, have been used for release accident of toxic substance since the accident can show different of dispersion range and velocity according to release material, storage facility and atmospheric status. However those systems have been used generally in design step of industry facility and are difficult to deal with release accident quickly. Although some researches and cases have been studied for using real-time atmospheric information, there are insufficient system for processing quickly release accident. This paper aims to develop real-time smart atmospheric dispersion system that can deal with release accident quickly by enhancing distinct characteristics and efficiency of energy plant, and select release time and area using intelligent algorithm as accident prevention type.

• Proceedings of the Korea Institute of Fire Science and Engineering Conference
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• 1996.11a
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• pp.53-56
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• 1996

In order to propose the method of the consequence analysis for fire accidents by the heavy gas release and to obtain optimum conditions of parameter selections, the consequence analysis for jet fire by the accident of xylene vapor release were performed. And the effect and the sensitivity analysis of parameters affecting the consequence were investigated. Simulation results showed that important parameters affecting results of the xylene vapor release accident were mainly hole diameter, interested distance, wind speed, and so on. For the jet fire, the accident result and the sensitivity of thermal radiation were increased with the decrease of interested distance and the increase of hole diameters, and the accidental result was increased as the increase wind speed, but the sensitivity of thermal radiation was decreased.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.29-39
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• 2006

The effect of parameters on the consequence of the flash fire accident by the release of heavy gas(in this study, xylene vapor) was analyzed. Simulation results showed that the distance with the lower flammable limit($X_{LFL}$) was increased with the increase of the release hole diameter. For the case of the elevated release, $X_{LFL}$ was increased with the increase of the wind speed and the release height, but $X_{LFL}$ was not affected by the wind speed for the release on the ground level. Therefore, the accident in the elevated release was more dangerous than the release on the ground level. In this condition, the release height had more effect on $X_{LFL}$ at the night time than the daytime and in the urban area than the rural area.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.35-43
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• 2002

For the unconfined vapor cloud explosion accident by the continuous release of gas-liquid flow of various saturated liquids in a vessel at ground level, overpressures were estimated and analyzed with various release conditions and materials by TNT equivalency model with vapor dispersion. We found that at same release conditions, overpressure showed n-heptane > xylene > n-hexane > toluene > n-heptane > benzene, respectively and that overpressure was increased with increasing the hole diameter and the storage pressure, but it was increased with decreasing the wind speed, the interested distance, and the vessel thickness.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.812-824
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• 2021

In order to reduce risks from the Steam Generator Tube Rupture (SGTR) accident and to meet safety targets, various measures have been analyzed to minimize the amount of fission product (FP) release. In this paper, we propose an introduction of a Containment Filtered Venting System (CFVS) connected to the steam generator secondary side, which can reduce the amount of FP release while minimizing adverse effects identified in the previous studies. In order to compare the effect of new equipment with the existing strategy, accident simulations using MELCOR were performed. As a result of simulations, it is confirmed that CFVS operation lowers FP release into the environment, and the release fractions are lower (minimum 0.6% of the initial inventory for Cs) than that of the strategy which intends to depressurize the primary system directly (minimum 15.2% for Cs). The sensitivity analyses identify that refill of the CFVS vessel is a dominant contributor reducing the amount of FP released. As the new strategy has the possibility of hydrogen combustion and detonation in CFVS, the installation of an igniter inside the CFVS vessel may be considered in reducing such hydrogen risk.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.64-70
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• 2003

For the unconfined vapor cloud explosion(UVCE) accident by the continuous release of gas-liquid flow of various saturated liquids in a vessel at ground level, overpressures were estimated by TNT equivalency model with two estimation methods, such as UVCE I model based on a constant release time and UVCEII model based on a real travel time of vapor by dispersion and analyzed with various release conditions. As a simulation result the simple, easy, and correct method of evaluation of consequences of the UVCE accident was proposed by using consequences of UVCE I model and correlation equations for differences of overpressures between UVCE models, so that this evaluation method could be used easily in the small and medium size enterprises without using the dispersion model.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.9 no.2 s.27
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• pp.43-49
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• 2005

Today toxic gas has various uses. If there is a release accident, the gas rapidly disperse into the atmosphere. The extent of damage due to toxic gas accident is very wide and fatal to human being. So, it is necessary for toxic gas facilities which have high risk to construct an emergency response system that prepare to toxic release and make immediate response to be possible at accident appearance. In this study accident scenario were selected and frequency analysis was executed using FTA technique. Dispersion effect of toxic gas release was analyzed using DNV company's PHAST(Ver. 6.2). Finally, an emergency response system was developed using results of quantitative risk analysis.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.104-111
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• 2016

Recently, the quantities of chemical material are increasing in chemical industries. At that time, release accident is increasing due to aging of equipment, mechanical failure, human error, etc. and industrial complexes found community properties in a specific area. For that matter, chemical release accident can lead to hight probability of large disaster. There is a need to analyze the boundaries optimal sensor placement calculated by selecting release scenarios through release condition and wether condition in a chemical process for release detection and response. This paper is to investigate chlorine release accident scenarios using COMSOL. Through accident scenarios, a numerical calculation is studied to determine optimized sensor placement with weight of detection probability, detection time and concentration. In addition, validity of sensor placement is improved by robustness analysis about unpredicted accident scenarios. Therefore, this verifies our studies can be effectively applicable on any process. As mention above, the result of this study can help to place mobile sensor, to track gas release based concentration data.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.2690-2701
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• 2022

In this paper, we select important fission products for the estimation of the source term during a severe accident of a PWR. The selection is based on the numerical results obtained from depletion calculations for the typical PWR fuel via the in-house code named DEGETION (Depletion, Generation, and Transmutation of Isotopes on Nuclear Application), release fractions of the fission products derived from NUREG-1465, and effective dose conversion coefficients from ICRP 119. Then, for the selected fission products, we obtain the adjoint solutions of the Bateman equations for radioactive decay in order to determine the importance of precursors producing the aforementioned fission products via radioactive decay, which would provide insights into the assumption used in MACCS 2 for a level 3 PSA analysis in which up to six precursors are considered in the calculations of radioactive decays for the fission product after release from the reactor.