A Program for Predicting Air Pollution in Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives (CBRNE) Disasters

A Program for Predicting Air Pollution in Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives (CBRNE) Disasters

Kwanghee Lee^a, Jaedeuk Park^a, Yi Yoon^b, Sungyun Her^c, Il Moon^a,*

^aDepartment of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-749, Korea

^bResearch Institute of Disaster and Emergency Management, Inje University, 197 Inje-ro, Jung-gu, Gyeongsangnam-do 621-749, Korea

^cNational Emergency Management Agency, 209 Sejongdae-ro, Jongro-gu, Seoul 110-760, Korea

Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives (CBRNE) disasters involve industrial accidents at chemical and nuclear power plants, incidents from the use of weapons at terrors or wars, and accidents at transportation of hazardous materials. Those disasters incur release of severely hazardous materials into atmosphere, and are featured to be very difficult and expensive to forecast as well as highly lethal once an incident occurs. Internationally representative CBRNE accidents may include those of nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine and chemical plant at Bhopal, India, bringing out massive damages to both the accident nation and its neighbors. In recent years, many chemical and radiological accidents have taken place in South Korea, for example, the accident of Hydrogen Fluoride (HF) release at Gu-mi in 2012 killed 5 people and made all Gu-mi residents impossible to sustain their daily business and life. A majority of countries which operate chemical and nuclear power plants have their own emergency response systems. Among them, National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC), USA can be thought as being the most advanced worldwide. South Korea has made enormous efforts to develop a set of systems for responsively and effectively managing CBRNE disasters; Chemical Accident Response Information System (CARIS) and Atom-CARE as a system for managing combined chemical and radiological accidents. However, one of the main problems is that the two systems are operated separately in different government ministries, leading to inefficiency in dealing with CBRNE disasters. This study is concerned with the development of a new prototype package for predicting air pollution of combined chemical and radiological accidents, as shown in Figure 1. One of main features of the program is an addition of a new zone taking into account damage on sensitive civilians, namely, "sensitive zone" to existing three zones classified in terms of levels of dispersions of hazardous materials. The prototype package can potentially be expected to be of great help for the development of a program for managing CBRNE disasters in South Korea.

Fig. SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1. Scheme of integrated program

REFERENCES

[1] Michael M, Bradley. NARAC: an emergency response resource for predicting the atmospheric dispersion and assessing the consequences of airborne radionuclides. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 2007;96:116-21.

[2] Han MH, Kim EH, Suh WT, Hwang WT, Jeong HJ. Development of radiological dose assessment systems to support a radiological emergency preparedness in Korea. Annals of Nuclear Energy 2012;43:187-91.