Development of a Marine Radioactivity Expert System based on the Extended Marine Food Web: Experiments with Initial Bottom Contamination

Abstract

An extended version of an expert system was developed as an effort to provide technical support to decision makers for the initial prompt assessment of environmental impacts of marine radioactivity, considering both pelagic and benthic marine food webs. The preliminary version of this system was firstly developed to determine the transfer of radionuclides through a pelagic marine food web (Kim et al, 2020). This system's approach was similar to the Cornell Mixing Zone Expert System (CORMIX) developed by Jirka (1995), as it used idealized settings for the physical/hydrodynamic coastal conditions. Existing or extended systems were executed by taking into account different kinds of radioactivity sources. The initial contamination of bottom sediment is considered in the present study, while the direct discharge to the coastal ocean from the nuclear power plant was considered in the early study. Assuming initial contamination, sensitivity experiments of temporal ¹³⁷Cs variations without/with horizontal advection and diffusion (EXP-WOHAD and EXP-WHAD, respectively) were conducted. In EXP-WOHAD, a total of six test cases were constructed, considering a range of vertical diffusion coefficients and sediment fluxes at the water-sea bed interface. The EXP-WHAD experiments were classified into two categories with six cases each, considering the horizontal diffusion and advection processes. The EXP-WOHAD results show that the vertical diffusion processes in the bottom sediment result in the exponential decay of the ¹³⁷Cs concentrations in the top sediment layer through upward and downward diffusive fluxes, producing pulse-like time variations in ¹³⁷Cs in the water column and the middle sediment layer. These sediment fluxes affect the peak height and its occurrence time in the water column and the middle sediment layer. From EXP-WHAD, it has been confirmed that part of ¹³⁷Cs diffused into the water column experiences horizontal dispersion and thereafter deposition to the bottom sediment. It is noted that due to the limited diffusion to the water column, the ¹³⁷Cs concentrations in benthic organisms are larger than those in pelagic organisms.