Abstract

Historical activities at facilities producing nuclear materials for weapons released radioactivity into the air and water. Past studies in the United States have evaluated the release, atmospheric transport and environmental accumulation of 131I from the nuclear facilities at Hanford in Washington State and the resulting dose to members of the public (Farris et al. 1994). A multi-year dose reconstruction effort (Mokrov et al. 2004) is also being conducted to produce representative dose estimates for members of the public living near Mayak, Russia, from atmospheric releases of 131I at the facilities of the Mayak Production Association. The approach to calculating individual doses to members of the public from historical releases of airborne 131I has the following general steps: • Construct estimates of releases 131I to the air from production facilities. • Model the transport of 131I in the air and subsequent deposition on the ground and vegetation. • Model the accumulation of 131I in soil, water and food products (environmental media). • Calculate the dose for an individual by matching the appropriate lifestyle and consumption data for the individual to the concentrations of 131I in environmental media at their residence location. A number of computer codes were developed to facilitate themore » study of airborne 131I emissions at Hanford. The RATCHET code modeled movement of 131I in the atmosphere (Ramsdell Jr. et al. 1994). The DECARTES code modeled accumulation of 131I in environmental media (Miley et al. 1994). The CIDER computer code estimated annual doses to individuals (Eslinger et al. 1994) using the equations and parameters specific to Hanford (Snyder et al. 1994). Several of the computer codes developed to model 131I releases from Hanford are general enough to be used for other facilities. This document provides user instructions for computer codes calculating doses to members of the public from atmospheric 131I that have two major differences from the Hanford modeling sequence. First, the air transport code HYSPLIT (Draxler et al. 2012) is used instead of the RATCHET code. Second, the new individual dose code CiderF replaces the older CIDER code and five auxiliary codes.« le Document type: Report