Modeling tritium release to the atmosphere during the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident and application to estimating post-accident water system transit times

During the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident on March 11, 2011, radionuclides such as tritium were released into the environment across Japan, obscuring the natural background signal of tritium in precipitation. This anthropogenic component was rapidly washed out by precipitation according to measurements in Japan. However, the impact of the accident on the natural tritium-based estimation of water system transit times in Fukushima and other prefectures in Japan remains uncertain. For the first time, anthropogenic tritium from the FDNPP accident together with natural tritium were simulated in an atmospheric general circulation model with a good ability to represent tritium variations in daily and monthly precipitation. For the FDNPP accident, we estimate the maximum tritium atmospheric emission of 0.815 PBq with a tritium in precipitation peak of 68.7 Bq/L (582 tritium units) on March 2011 at Fukushima, which are consistent with previous estimations. Using our modeled outputs with tritium measurements, we improve tritium-tracer application for estimating mean transit times of Fukushima surface and groundwater systems impacted by the anthropogenic tritium from the FDNPP accident. While the anthropogenic impact of the FDNPP accident was limited compared to the tritium peak due to the thermonuclear testing, globally modeled tritium in precipitation is useful to apply for other areas of tritium-tracer studies.