As the decommissioning of nuclear power plants progresses, interest in the inevitably generated radioactive waste is also increasing. Especially, because the containers of ILW packages are significantly more expensive than the containers of LLW packages, the special attention should be focused on minimizing the number of the containers of ILW packages. The radiation dose limit for packaging of ILW shall not exceed 2 mSv/h and 0.1 mSv/h on contact and at 2 m, respectively in South Korea. Meanwhile, The DEMplus provides various environmental geometry and all properties such as materials, absorptions, and reflections and the estimation of the radiation dose rates is based on the radiation interactions of the designed 3D geometry model. With the consideration of the radiation dose rate by using DEMplus and its strategy of packaging and cutting plan, the number of containers for ILW packages generated from decommissioning of Reactor Vessel Internal (RVI) of a nuclear power plant that has been in operation for decades was optimized in this paper. The modular shielded containers (MSC) with shielding inserted were used for radioactive wastes that require shielded packaging. In order to verify the accuracy of the estimated radiation dose rate by using DEMplus, the estimated results were compared with those obtained using MicroShield. The trends of the estimated radiation dose rates using DEMplus and the estimation of MicroShield were similar to each other. The results of this study demonstrated the feasibility of using DEMplus as a means of estimating the radiation dose limit in packaging plan of the radioactive waste.
As the decommissioning of nuclear power plants increases, there is an increasing interest in the amounts of radioactive waste. Especially, the radiation dose limit for packaging of radioactive wastes shall not exceed 2 mSv·h−1 and 0.1 mSv·h−1 on contact and at 2 m, respectively in South Korea. The DEMplus provides various environmental geometry and all properties such as materials, absorptions, and reflections and the estimation of the radiation dose rates is based on the radiation interactions of the designed 3D geometry model. With the consideration of the radiation dose rate by using DEMplus and its strategy of packaging plan, the radiation shielding was optimized and estimated in this paper. The modular shielded containers (MSC) with shielding inserted were used for radioactive wastes that require shielded packaging. In order to verify the accuracy of the estimated radiation dose rate by using DEMplus, the estimated results were compared with those obtained using MicroShield. The trends of the estimated radiation dose rates using DEMplus and the estimation of MicroShield were similar to each other. The results of this study demonstrated the feasibility of using DEMplus as a means of estimating the radiation dose limit in packaging plan of the radioactive waste.
In the dismantling process of a reactor coolant system (RCS) piping, a radiation protection plan should be established to minimize the radiation exposure doses of dismantling workers. Hence, it is necessary to estimate the individual effective dose in the RCS piping dismantling process when decommissioning a nuclear power plant. In this study, the radiation exposure doses of the dismantling workers at different positions was estimated using the MicroShield dose assessment program based on the NUREG/CR-1595 report. The individual effective dose, which is the sum of the effective dose to each tissue considering the working time, was used to estimate the radiation exposure dose. The estimations of the simulation results for all RCS piping dismantling tasks satisfied the dose limits prescribed by the ICRP-60 report. In dismantling the RCS piping of the Kori-1 or Wolsong-1 units in South Korea, the estimation and reduction method for the radiation exposure dose, and the simulated results of this study can be used to implement the radiation safety for optimal dismantling by providing information on the radiation exposure doses of the dismantling workers.
Hydrologic responses to variations in storm direction provide useful information for the analysis and prediction of floods and the development of watershed management strategies. However, the prediction of hydrologic responses to changes in storm direction is a difficult task that requires meteorological simulations and extensive computation. It is also difficult to identify the center of rotation of a storm affecting a basin of interest. Therefore, we propose a simple approach of rotating the basin position relative to the storm within the rainfall-runoff simulation model instead of changing the pathway of the storm, which we term the Basin Rotation Method (BRM). The proposed BRM was tested on four major typhoon events in South Korea. The results illustrated that the original basin orientation (i.e., before it was rotated) exhibits earlier and higher peak discharge and earlier recession compared to the basin after rotation. We conclude that the proposed method (BRM) is a viable alternative for use in assessing the directional influence of moving storms on floods caused by historical rather than hypothetical storm events.