Review of spatial scale dispersion models (ATDMs) to simulate environmental dispersion and deposition of radionuclides and the overview of GIS coupling with dispersion models

Estimation of the radiological consequences including the calculation of radiation doses to the exposed population requires numerical evaluation of atmospheric radioactive releases from nuclear facilities under accidental scenarios for implementation of adequate protective and other response actions to prevent or minimize severe deterministic effects and reduce the probability of occurrence of stochastic effects. This paper reviews various state-of-the-art spatial scale atmospheric dispersion models, known as the ATDMs, designed to evaluate atmospheric transport, dispersion, and depositions of radionuclide emissions from release sources. The ATDMs (atmospheric transport, dispersion, and deposition models) reviewed in this paper are FLEXPART, CALPUFF, LADAS, RASCAL, RIMPUFF, and HotSpot. These ATDMs are increasingly applied to perform probabilistic radiological risk assessment, which is one of the IAEA safety requirements for site evaluation of new NPP, and the calculated doses can be used to establish EPZs, an underlying basis of emergency preparedness. The numerical approaches, modeling methodology, advantages, limitations, scope of applications, and research investigations performed using these models in radiological and other environmental impact assessments within their scope of applications are presented. GIS has been widely recognized as a technique applied to aid the modeling of pollutant dispersion and visualization of model outputs in a spatial context, among other benefits. In nuclear accident consequence evaluation, spatial data provides key information such as accident location, range of radiological contamination, population density, etc, which are very important. This demonstrates the high significance of GIS-ATDMs coupling. Therefore, an overview of the coupling of dispersion models with GIS is also highlighted.