Dr. Nikolaos Evangeliou Nikolaos Evangeliou has recently joined the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) as a scientist. His research interests focus on the dispersion of radionuclides after accidental releases and fire events in contaminated forests and the impact on human and non-human biota, inverse modeling of radionuclides and BC, Arctic pollution and climate change.
Source-term is a key parameter after accidents and usually takes a long time to be determined in detail. We have developed an inversion algorithm to calculate the emissions of greenhouse gases or volcanic sulfur dioxide and ash emissions. Depending on the application, the algorithm incorporates different types of observation data and can be based on forward or backward calculations with FLEXPART model. The same algorithm was applied to determine the emissions of 133Xe and 137Cs from the accident in Japan in 2011.
Forward modeling can be proved a powerful tool when assessing accidental releases in terms of radiation protection countermeasures to the public and the ecosystem. Once the source is known, models can run online to estimate the fate of dispersion of radionuclides and hence, to predict the long-term effects on the public (prior to epidemiology) and the environment (prior to evolutionary changes). Here, we present some results on the recent accident in Fukushima (2011).