(423c) 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.