[ RadSafe ] Fly Ash

[blreider at aol.com]

Ladies & Gentlemen:

Argonne National Lab generated an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) regarding conversion of oil to coal following the passage of the Fuel Use Act of 1978.  I cannot find this document online but I didn't try really hard.

I was the author of the dose calculations of this document.  We used early ResRad created by Dr. Yuchien Yan, Dr. Lyle Roberts and others, hich at the time was based on ICRP-2 models.  My recolation is that the doses from fly ash to local populations were greater than the doses to local populations from many other industries including doses to local populations outside nuclear power plants.  I do not recall the evaluations of chemical contaminants.  Of course this is due to inhaltion of airborne fly ash.    

Conservatiss and non-conservaisms:   I do not recall how conservative we were with the particle size distribution.  The EIS was limited to those industries ANL was charged with considering, which if memory serves me correctly included smaller facilities used to provide local power for industry, but did not include larger power facilities although the Argonne contingent of scientists requested that we be alowed to add this.  

I guess you can come to the conclusion if you want that normally operating nuclear power plants are safer than other sources of radionuclides.  Or not.  In any case I thought that it might be useful to the fly-ash discussion if someone wanted to pull this up.  

Food for discussion!

Barbara Reider, CHP