Radioecology in CONFIDENCE: Dealing with uncertainties relevant for decision making

Wolfgang Raskob, Talal Al Mahaini, Nicholas A. Beresford

    Research outputpeer-review

    Abstract

    The CONFIDENCE project is performing research on uncertainties in emergency management and post-accident recovery. It concentrates on the early and transition phases of an emergency, but considers also longer-term decisions made during these phases. To ensure success, the project brings together expertise from four European Radiation Protection Research Platforms (NERIS, MELODI, ALLIANCE and EURADOS) and also from the area of social sciences and humanities. This paper presents an overview of the CONFIDENCE project with a focus on CONFIDENCE's consideration of the radioecology required to support emergency management and post-accident recovery. For instance, operational decisions concerning land and foodchain management rely on radioecological models that are at present mostly based on simple, but highly uncertain, transfer ratios to predict contamination in foodstuffs. CONFIDENCE will investigate if process-based models are better suited to reducing uncertainties associated with empirical ratio based models. Model improvements and uncertainty reduction might be also possible by better evaluating past experience from Chernobyl and Fukushima.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)399-404
    JournalJournal of environmental radioactivity
    Volume192
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 24 Jul 2018

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