Optimizing long-term monitoring of radiation air dose rates

Wainwright, Haruko*; Oroza, C.*; Sun, D.*; Seki, Akiyuki; Mikami, Satoshi; Saito, Kimiaki

45th Annual Waste Management Conference (WM 2019); Encouraging Young Men & Women to Achieve Their Goals in Radwaste Management, Vol.7, p.4346 - 4356, 2020/01

In this work, we have developed a methodology for optimizing the sampling locations of radiation air dose-rate monitoring. Three steps are taken in order to determine sampling locations in a systematic manner: (1) prioritizing the critical locations, such as schools or regulatory requirement locations, (2) diversifying locations across the key environmental controls that are known to influence contaminant mobility and distributions, and (3) capturing the heterogeneity of radiation air dose rates across the domain. Our results have shown that increasing the number of sampling locations can better capture the heterogeneity of dose rates, although the estimation error does not decrease further after a certain number of samples. We have also found that when there are restrictions such as pre-existing monitoring locations or the ones along roads, the spatial estimation becomes poor even with the same number of monitoring locations.