Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

• Home
• About the Project
• Research Activities
• Publications and Presentations

 

• Information on Nuclear Power Plants(NPPs)
• Republic of Korea
• China
• Japan
• Development of Models
• Regional sediment transport model
• Regional radionuclide transport model
• Long-term dispersion model
• Tsunami wave propagation model
• Collected References on Radioactivity Studies

Home > Research Activities > Development of Models > Long-term dispersion model

  As a consequence of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred  about 130 km off the Pacific coast of  Japan’s main island Honshu and subsequent tsunami hitting the east coast of Japan on 11 March 2011 the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) were severely damaged and radioactive material was released to the atmosphere as well as to the ocean.

  In this study we are concerned with long-term oceanic-scale dispersion of Cs 137 released from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP. The circulation model uses POM covering the domain 75ºS-65ºN, 0º-360ºE with horizontal resolution, 0.5º×0.5º and 21 vertical sigma layers. The model topography is interpolated from the global 5′ by 5′ ETOPO5 dataset. The circulation model is driven by monthly climatological  (COADS) wind stresses and heat fluxes. The initial temperature and salinity fields are set to the Levitus annually averaged temperature and salinity, and the initial velocities are set to zero. A spin up calculation is performed for 10 years. The formulation proposed by Tsumune et al(2003) is used to simulate the transport of the radionuclide which takes into account the transfer effect  to the suspended sediment in a simple way.http://www.mrcor.org/Research.aspx?m_id=5