Air Pathway Dose Modeling for the E-Area Low-Level Waste Facility

Abstract

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Order 435.1 performance assessment (PA) process (USDOE 1999) prescribes a performance objective (10 mrem y -1 ) for evaluating atmospheric releases of radionuclides from DOE low-level waste (LLW) disposal facilities. The potential dose to an individual from exposure to radionuclides released into the atmosphere from LLW disposals can be estimated by application of radionuclide -specific dose-release factors (DRFs) (mrem Ci -1 ) to estimated flux rates (Ci y -1 ) at a particular time and location. In Revision 0 of this report, Lee (2006) calculated DRFs for potential atmospheric releases of 15 volatile radionuclides from seven ELLWF disposal units in support of the 2008 ELLWF PA (WSRC 2008). The mainframe version of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) dose model CAP88 was used in the Revision 0 assessment. In Revision 1 of this report (Dixon and Minter 2017), the site-specific Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) atmospheric dose models MAXDOSE-SR version 2013 (Stone and Jannik 2013a) and MAXINE version 2017 (Bell 2017) were used to calculate DRFs for ten radionuclides. This work (Revision 2) supersedes Revision 0 (Lee 2006) and Revision 1 (Dixon and Minter 2017) of this report. The Revision 2 method for estimating new DRFs for the ELLWF disposal units is described in this report.