Annual report on the environmental radiation monitoring around the Tokai Reprocessing Plant FY2023

Kokubun, Yuji; Hosomi, Kenji; Nagaoka, Mika; Seya, Natsumi; Inoue, Kazumi; Koike, Yuko; Uchiyama, Rei; Sasaki, Kazuki; Maehara, Yushi; Matsuo, Kazuki; et al.

JAEA-Review 2024-054, 168 Pages, 2025/03

JAEA-Review-2024-054.pdf:2.73MB

The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories conducts environmental radiation monitoring around the reprocessing plant in accordance with the "Safety Regulations for Reprocessing Plant of JAEA, Part IV: Environmental Monitoring". This report summarizes the results of environmental radiation monitoring conducted during the period from April 2023 to March 2024 and the results of dose calculations for the surrounding public due to the release of radioactive materials from the plant into the atmosphere and ocean. In the results of the above environmental radiation monitoring, several items were affected by radioactive materials emitted from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station of Tokyo Electric Power Company, Incorporated (changed to Tokyo Electric Power Holdings, Inc. on April 1, 2016), which occurred in March 2011. In addition, environmental monitoring plan, analysis and measurement methods, monitoring data and their chronological change, meteorological data after statistical processing, status of radioactive waste release and evaluation results of the data over the normal range are included as appendices.

None

Koike, Ayaka*; Takubo, Yusaku*; Anraku, Sohtaro; Kawakita, Ryohei

NUMO-TR-24-03, p.62 - 64, 2024/10

https://www.numo.or.jp/technology/technical_report/pdf/NUMO-TR-24-03.pdf

no abstracts in English

Annual report on the effluent control of low level liquid waste in Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories FY2022

Kokubun, Yuji; Nakada, Akira; Seya, Natsumi; Nagaoka, Mika; Koike, Yuko; Kubota, Tomohiro; Hirao, Moe; Yoshii, Hideki*; Otani, Kazunori*; Hiyama, Yoshinori*; et al.

JAEA-Review 2023-052, 118 Pages, 2024/03

JAEA-Review-2023-052.pdf:3.67MB

Based on the regulations (the safety regulation of Tokai Reprocessing Plant, the safety regulation of nuclear fuel material usage facilities, the radiation safety rule, the regulation about prevention from radiation hazards due to radioisotopes, which are related with the nuclear regulatory acts, the local agreement concerning with safety and environment conservation around nuclear facilities, the water pollution control law, and by law of Ibaraki Prefecture), the effluent control of liquid waste discharged from the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories of Japan Atomic Energy Agency has been performed. This report describes the effluent control results of the liquid waste in the fiscal year 2022. In this period, the concentrations and the quantities of the radioactivity in liquid waste discharged from the reprocessing plant, the plutonium fuel fabrication facilities, and the other nuclear fuel material usage facilities were much lower than the limits authorized by the above regulations.

Joint clarification of contaminant plume and hydraulic transmissivity via a geostatistical approach using hydraulic head and contaminant concentration data

Takai, Shizuka; Shimada, Taro; Takeda, Seiji; Koike, Katsuaki*

Mathematical Geosciences, 56(2), p.333 - 360, 2024/02

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-023-10084-8

To enable proper remediation of accidental groundwater contamination, the contaminant plume evolution needs to be accurately estimated. In the estimation, uncertainties in both the contaminant source and hydrogeological structure should be considered, especially the temporal release history and hydraulic transmissivity. Although the release history can be estimated using geostatistical approaches, previous studies use the deterministic hydraulic property field. Geostatistical approaches can also effectively estimate an unknown heterogeneous transmissivity field via the joint data use, such as a combination of hydraulic head and tracer data. However, tracer tests implemented over a contaminated area necessarily disturb the in situ condition of the contamination. Conversely, measurements of the transient concentration data over an area are possible and can preserve the conditions. Accordingly, this study develops a geostatistical method for the joint clarification of contaminant plume and transmissivity distributions using both head and contaminant concentration data. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated through two numerical experiments assuming a two-dimensional heterogenous confined aquifer. The use of contaminant concentration data is key to accurate estimation of the transmissivity. The accuracy of the proposed method using both head and concentration data was verified achieving a high linear correlation coefficient of 0.97 between the true and estimated concentrations for both experiments, which was 0.67 or more than the results using only the head data. Furthermore, the uncertainty of the contaminant plume evolution was successfully evaluated by considering the uncertainties of both the initial plume and the transmissivity distributions, based on their conditional realizations.

Probabilistic risk assessment for sodium-cooled fast reactors by the CMMC method; Consideration of operator's recognition probability for accident managements

Koike, Akari*; Nemoto, Masaya*; Nakashima, Risako*; Sakai, Takaaki*; Doda, Norihiro; Tanaka, Masaaki

Proceedings of 2023 International Congress on Advanced in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2023) (Internet), 2 Pages, 2023/04

To evaluate the effect of the operator's recognition of the accident management (AM) necessity on plant safety, the operator's recognition of the AM necessity was modeled as a function of time-dependent success probability, and dynamic PRA analyses were performed for a sodium-cooled fast reactor during abnormal snowfall. The analysis results showed that the operator's recognition of the snowfall can avoid the core damage at an earlier stage after the accident.

Evaluating the effectiveness of a geostatistical approach with groundwater flow modeling for three-dimensional estimation of a contaminant plume

Takai, Shizuka; Shimada, Taro; Takeda, Seiji; Koike, Katsuaki*

Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, 251, p.104097_1 - 104097_12, 2022/12

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jconhyd.2022.104097

When assessing the risk from an underground environment that is contaminated by radioactive nuclides and hazardous chemicals and planning for remediation, the contaminant plume distribution and the associated uncertainty from measured data should be estimated accurately. While the release history of the contaminant plume may be unknown, the extent of the plume caused by a known source and the associated uncertainty can be calculated inversely from the concentration data using a geostatistical method that accounts for the temporal correlation of its release history and groundwater flow modeling. However, the preceding geostatistical approaches have three drawbacks: (1) no applications of the three-dimensional plume estimation in real situations, (2) no constraints for the estimation of the plume distribution, which can yield negative concentration and large uncertainties, and (3) few applications to actual cases with multiple contaminants. To address these problems, the non-negativity constraint using Gibbs sampling was incorporated into the geostatistical method with groundwater flow modeling for contaminant plume estimation. This method was then tested on groundwater contamination in the Gloucester landfill in Ontario, Canada. The method was applied to three water soluble organic contaminants: 1,4-dioxane, tetrahydrofuran, and diethyl ether. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by the general agreement of the calculated plume distributions of the three contaminants with concentration data from 66 points in 1982 (linear correlation coefficient of about 0.7). In particular, the reproduced large spill of organic contaminants of 1,4-dioxane in 1978 was more accurate than the result of preceding minimum relative entropy-based studies. The same peak also appeared in the tetrahydrofuran and diethyl ether distributions approximately within the range of the retardation factor derived from the fraction of organic carbon.

Quantitative risk assessment with CMMC method on abnormal snowfall incident for a sodium-cooled fast reactor

Nakashima, Risako*; Koike, Akari*; Sakai, Takaaki*; Doda, Norihiro; Tanaka, Masaaki

Proceedings of 29th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE 29) (Internet), 6 Pages, 2022/08

In development of a quantitative risk assessment method to the external hazards for a sodium-cooled fast reactor, a dynamic PRA using the Continuous Markov chain Monte Carlo (CMMC) method was performed to evaluate the effect of global warming on the probability of exceeding the temperature limit as a core damage factor. There is a possibility that the amount of snowfall in abnormal snowfall events will increase due to global warming in the future. A hazard curve of snowfall considering global warming was developed. The results show that the probability of exceeding the temperature limit is increased by the abnormal snowfall events due to global warming.

Annual report on the effluent control of low level liquid waste in Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories FY2020

Nakano, Masanao; Nakada, Akira; Kanai, Katsuta; Nagaoka, Mika; Koike, Yuko; Yamada, Ryohei; Kubota, Tomohiro; Yoshii, Hideki*; Otani, Kazunori*; Hiyama, Yoshinori*; et al.

JAEA-Review 2021-040, 118 Pages, 2021/12

JAEA-Review-2021-040.pdf:2.48MB

Based on the regulations (the safety regulation of Tokai Reprocessing Plant, the safety regulation of nuclear fuel material usage facilities, the radiation safety rule, the regulation about prevention from radiation hazards due to radioisotopes, which are related with the nuclear regulatory acts, the local agreement concerning with safety and environment conservation around nuclear facilities, the water pollution control law, and by law of Ibaraki Prefecture), the effluent control of liquid waste discharged from the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories of Japan Atomic Energy Agency has been performed. This report describes the effluent control results of the liquid waste in the fiscal year 2020. In this period, the concentrations and the quantities of the radioactivity in liquid waste discharged from the reprocessing plant, the plutonium fuel fabrication facilities, and the other nuclear fuel material usage facilities were much lower than the limits authorized by the above regulations.

Estimation of contaminated materials concentration by a geostatistical method with groundwater flow

Takai, Shizuka; Shimada, Taro; Takeda, Seiji; Koike, Katsuaki*

Joho Chishitsu, 32(3), P. 95, 2021/09

https://doi.org/10.6010/geoinformatics.32.3_89

We received best presentation award GEOINROUM-2021 for the presentation on "Estimation of contaminated materials concentration by a geostatistical method with groundwater flow". We submit the comments of impression for getting the Award to Geoinformatics.

Annual report on the effluent control of low level liquid waste in Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories FY2018

Nakano, Masanao; Fujii, Tomoko; Nagaoka, Mika; Inoue, Kazumi; Koike, Yuko; Yamada, Ryohei; Yoshii, Hideki*; Otani, Kazunori*; Hiyama, Yoshinori*; Kikuchi, Masaaki*; et al.

JAEA-Review 2019-045, 120 Pages, 2020/03

JAEA-Review-2019-045.pdf:2.54MB

Based on the regulations (the safety regulation of Tokai Reprocessing Plant, the safety regulation of nuclear fuel material usage facilities, the radiation safety rule, the regulation about prevention from radiation hazards due to radioisotopes, which are related with the nuclear regulatory acts, the local agreement concerning with safety and environment conservation around nuclear facilities, the water pollution control law, and by law of Ibaraki Prefecture), the effluent control of liquid waste discharged from the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering Laboratories of Japan Atomic Energy Agency has been performed. This report describes the effluent control results of the liquid waste in the fiscal year 2018. In this period, the concentrations and the quantities of the radioactivity in liquid waste discharged from the reprocessing plant, the plutonium fuel fabrication facilities, and the other nuclear fuel material usage facilities were much lower than the limits authorized by the above regulations.