A sensitivity study on effective protection measures for consequence analysis

Abstract

When a severe accident occurs in a nuclear power plant, early public protection measures are the best response to reduce the health effect of residents. Sheltering and evacuation are considered for residents as the early public protection measures. The evacuation before plume arrival is the most effective measure. It is actually difficult for all residents to evacuate before plume arrival because the distance between nuclear power plants and residential area is closer in Korea than other countries. And, the sheltering is also the effective measure, resulting in less substantial exposure. WinMACCS 3.10, the graphical user interface of representative level 3 PSA (Probabilistic Safety Assessment) code, can evaluate the effectiveness of these two public protection measures. The purpose of this work is to gain insight into the importance of variables in emergency response modeling and to understand the relevance between derived variables. Thus, the variables in WinMACCS affecting emergency response modeling were derived and sensitivity analysis was performed for these variables. In addition, not all possible uncertain input parameters were included. We expect that the results in this work might be useful information to establish emergency response model in WinMACCS, and it might provide a technical basis for future work.