Re: David Lochbaum (again) and TMI case

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 01:35 PM 11/8/1999 -0600, you wrote:
>
>I used to find it so fascinating that the
>projected plume models from an accident were drawn as either neat
>little cigar-shaped clouds or neat little pencil-shaped clouds. 
>Sharp boundaries and all.

Usually such plots represent the net effect on the ground and not the
location of the entire plume. The neat, cigar shape is the plume footprint
with plotted area being those places where the total dose is greater than X
mrem (where X is an absurdly small number). The pencil shape usually comes
from a night-time release into an inversion (stability class G) with very
little wind variability (small sigma theta), which can result in a very
narrow plume - it's just not on the ground. Still, there is a sky-shine
dose to the people under it.

Dispersion models share two characteristics: (1) nice smooth data sets
derived from equations, and (2) the real thing is never that smooth (or
even close).

===================================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
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