Air modeling as an alternative to sampling for low-level radioactive airborne releases

摘要

The Environmental Restoration Program for Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapons complex facilities faces challenges ranging from well-defined cleanups of specific contaminated sits to broader questions of the effects on the environment and human health of forty years of laboratory operations. Efforts in the latter category were accelerated by the promulgation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, and the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) of 1986 which rquire the DOE nuclear weapon complex facilities to comply with the same standards applied to industry. The DOE responded to the new regulatory requirements by the implementation of the Comprehensive Environmental Assessment and Response Program (CEARP), designed to bring Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) into compliance with RCRA and CERCLA.~(1-4) A particularly striking example of the effect of these regulatory requirements is the new scrutiny focused on airborne radioactive releases from DOE laboratories and the cumulative effect of past releases. This paper describes our efforts to assess the effect of these airborne releases at one DOE laboratory using air modeling based on historical data.