Using oceanography to control and forecast nuclear accidents and other passive particles problems

Abstract

This article is the last improved version of a previously published model (Toscano-Jimenez and Garcia-Tenorio, 2004) for the transport of the nuclear contamination and other passive particles in the ocean. Two interesting advances have been developed during last two years for the author's PhD thesis to be finished in the next months: (a) a suspended particulate matter (SPM) submodel, including erosion, transport and sedimentation. (b) A new advection-diffusion approach with numerical and computational improvements: finite elements (FE), finite differences (FD) and Monte Carlo (MC) methods have been compared and calibrated. The Baltic Sea has been elected as the validation scenario of the model and the radioisotope 137 Cs is the radiotracer to be analysed. This scenario was the most contaminated ecosystem out of the Soviet Union due to the Chernobyl accident which occurred at the end of April 1986, and the elected radiotracer 137 Cs was the main long-lived radioisotope emitted to the environment. However, an important aim of this model is its potential usefulness in other oceanic scenarios affected by a nuclear disaster in the future. It could be an interesting tool to predict and minimize the ecological and economical impacts of future accidents. This model can also be extended easily to non-nuclear contamination problems such as: oil accidents, nutrients dynamics and other biological problems.