News (2003)

News in 2003

9th December 2003 - Quintessa Develops PRISM Version 2.0 for Foodchain Modelling at the Food Standards Agency

The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) is investing in the development of software to model radionuclide transport in terrestrial foodchains following accidental or planned releases of radioactivity to the atmosphere. The PRISM code uses a 'wrapped' version of the AMBER compartmental modelling software with a bespoke Graphical User Interface (GUI) that provides direct access to a parameter database.

The PRISM v1.3 GUI The currently available version of the code (PRISM 1.3) provides a powerful capability for undertaking deterministic and probabilistic foodchain calculations, including the representation of correlated model parameters. It uses up-to-date models for radionuclide metabolism by animals, but the models for the Soil and Plant parts of the terrestrial foodchain were developed several years ago. The use of PRISM's probabilistic capabilities enables uncertainties in the calculation of potential contaminant concentration in crops and animal products to be evaluated.

The FSA has recently placed a contract with Quintessa to complete the transition of PRISM from a prototype to a fully functioning assessment tool. PRISM 2.0 will be developed over the next year, and will include new up-to-date models for the Soil and Plant parts of the terrestrial foodchain and will enable assessments to be undertaken for heavy metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium as well as radionuclides.

For further information please contact Philip Maul.

3rd November 2003 - SAFEGROUNDS

Reproduced by kind permission of CIRIA

The SAFEGROUNDS project, managed by CIRIA , is a forum for developing and making available good practice guidance on the management of radioactively and chemically contaminated land on nuclear and defence sites in the UK. It is open to all stakeholders and encourages discussion and feedback on all the key issues. A short summary of the SAFEGROUNDS guidance document "Good practice guidance for the management of contaminated land on nuclear and defence sites", has just been issued. This is intended to promote awareness and the use of the guidance. The summary has been prepared by James Penfold at Quintessa and Marion Hill, both of whom also collaborated on the development of the detailed guidance document. The summary, guidance, and other useful information is available at the SAFEGROUNDS website: www.safegrounds.com.

24th October 2003 - Best Practicable Environmental Option for LLW at Dounreay

Reproduced by kind permission of UKAEA

UKAEA Dounreay has recently embarked on a programme of public consultation on options for the long-term management of low-level radioactive waste arising from the restoration of the site with the aim of identifying the 'Best Practicable Environmental Option' (BPEO). The project is breaking new ground in development of strategy for the long-term management of large quantities of solid radioactive waste in the UK. Quintessa staff have been involved in this project over a period of several years. This has included assistance in developing the BPEO methodology, and contributing to a range of technical studies that support the BPEO project. These technical studies have given particular consideration to the potential impact of long-term waste management options on human health and the environment. For more information please see http://www.ukaea.org.uk/dounreay/llw.htm.

13th October 2003 - Wham! (Web-Hosted Amber Model)

The Wham! Basic User graphical interface

The Wham! Advanced User graphical interface

Quintessa is committed to providing online modelling tools that allow stakeholders to draw their own conclusions about environmental impacts. The latest of these (Wham!) is based upon the hypothetical Vault Test Case developed as part of the IAEA's Co-ordinated Research Project (CRP) on Improvement of Safety Assessment Methodologies for Near Surface Disposal Facilities (ISAM). The model represents a near-surface radioactive waste repository (vault) and simulates the fate of the contaminants released due to the infiltration of water. Contaminants are leached from the vault into the unsaturated zone and then into an underlying aquifer. They are then transported through the aquifer to a well from which water is abstracted for human use. Wham! has been designed with two graphical user interfaces, intended to make the model understandable and useable by both people with little experience of this kind of modelling and by advanced users, and is capable of automatically generating both web-based and PDF reports.

15th August 2003 - Development of Waste Package Evolution Scenarios

Quintessa has assisted Nirex in developing waste package evolution scenarios for the geological disposal of low-level and intermediate-level wastes, as input to investigating the importance of time-dependency and heterogeneity effects on post-closure repository performance*. In addition to a base scenario, seven variant scenario classes have been defined representing combinations of enhanced water flux, altered water chemistry and physical disruption, and scenarios were presented as combined storyboards and timelines. If you would like a copy of the report, please contact Nirex at info@nirex.co.uk.

* L.E.F. Bailey and D.P. Hodgkinson. Development of Waste Package Evolution Scenarios for the Nirex Phased Disposal Concept. Nirex Report N/062, November 2002.

7th July 2003 - Post-closure safety of SFR

The SFR 1 repository at Forsmark in Sweden is operated by the Swedish Nuclear fuel and Waste Management Company and used for the final disposal of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste produced by the Swedish nuclear power programme, industry, medicine and research. It has been receiving wastes since 1988. In 1992 it was granted a full-scale operating permit following the first in-depth safety assessment in 1991. One of the conditions of the licence was that a revised safety assessment should be carried out by SKB at least every ten years during the continued operation of the facility. The first 10-year SKB re-evaluation was submitted to the regulators (The Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate, SKI and the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, SSI) at the end of June 2001.

Quintessa has provided support to SKI in evaluating SKB's case for the post-closure safety of the SFR facility. Quintessa's work has been documented in three SKI reports:

SKI Report 02:61, "SKB's Project SAFE for the SFR 1 Repository - A Review by Consultants to SKI".
SKI Report 02:62, "Exploration of Important Issues for the Safety of SFR 1 using Performance Assessment Calculations".
SKI Report 00:49 "Evolution of Near-Field Physico-Chemical Characteristics of the SFR Repository"

The identification of key issues for the safety case was assisted by the use of independent Performance Assessment (PA) calculations using AMBER; the results of these calculations are described in the second of these reports. The SFR system is complex, partly because the environment is expected to change relatively rapidly over the next few thousand years as the land rises and the Baltic coastline recedes. Although SFR is under the Baltic at the present time, this is unlikely to be the case for the whole of period for which PA calculations are undertaken. This potential environmental change is represented explicitly in the AMBER calculations.

The response of SKI and SSI to the safety case re-evaluation will be published soon. For more information, please contact Philip Maul.

27th June 2003 - AMBER Training Courses

Quintessa provides training courses in the use and application of the compartment modelling software AMBER that is jointly supported with Enviros. Recent training courses have been provided in Lithuania and South Africa involving 15 new AMBER users. The courses aim to provide participants with training in the use of compartment models and their application to safety assessments, as well as basic and advanced training in the use of AMBER itself.

Further information about AMBER is provided on the website hosted by Enviros, alternatively, please feel free to contact Russell Walke if you have any questions.

Some of the NECSA participants
(from the left): Lee Ainslie, Linde Nel, Miriam Edwin and Panganai Dzanga

Participants hard at work

13th June 2003 - VALDOR Symposiums

Discussion continues in the Blue Hall at Stockholm City Hall, location of the Annual Nobel Prize Banquet

Mike Egan took part in the third VALDOR symposium in Stockholm, from 9-13 June. He was an author of two papers and chaired one of the plenary sessions on "Efforts towards a broader framing". VALDOR is concerned with decisions in controversial areas of risk, and is a meeting point for a wide range of disciplines working in the borderland between technical studies, social and political sciences, media and culture. The main themes of this year's meeting were radioactive waste management and gene technology, including discussions of case studies and practical tools as well as academic reviews and research. Quintessa has a strong international network of contacts in this field and is increasingly involved in work for a range of clients that builds on our experiences in dealing with risk information and values.

For more information, please contact Mike Egan.

8th June 2003 - Improved modelling of engineered barriers in LLW disposal facilities

Safety assessments of low level radioactive waste (LLW) disposal facilities often adopt a relatively simplistic and cautious approach to the modelling radionuclide releases from the waste and repository (the 'near-field'). Quintessa has recently completed a study for Ontario Power Generation (www.opg.com) to review the near-field models and associated computer codes. In light of the review, an improved approach has been developed and applied to generic LLW disposal concepts. The results indicated more than an order of magnitude reduction in calculated doses for most of the calculation cases considered in the study compared with an earlier model due to the more detailed representation of the near field and its associated processes. For more information contact Richard Little or James Penfold.

19th May 2003 - AMBER Version 4.5 Launched at Japanese Workshop

Version 4.5 of the AMBER compartment modelling software has just been released by Enviros and Quintessa featuring a variety of enhancements, such as the inclusion of an import/export facility to facilitate its use in combination with other codes. AMBER has now been applied by 57 organisations in 23 countries to a wide range of environmental modelling problems, ranging from the disposal of radioactive waste to the fate of organophosphates in the soil. To correspond with the release of version 4.5 and to provide an illustration of the wide range of problems to which AMBER has been applied, a workshop, attended by 21 users from Japan and South Korea, was held in Yokohama (Japan). In addition, AMBER training courses are being provided for a range of clients during 2003 in China, Hungary, Lithuania, and South Africa. For more information on AMBER, its applications and training courses, contact Russell Walke or visit the AMBER website hosted by Enviros.

9th April 2003 - David Hodgkinson joins Advisory Board of Reading Enterprise Hub

David Hodgkinson has been appointed to the Reading Enterprise Hub Advisory Board. The Reading Enterprise Hub is a business incubator located at the heart of the University of Reading's research community at the main Whiteknights campus. It aims to stimulate the growth of high knowledge based businesses, especially in the environmental technology and services sectors. For more information about the Reading Enterprise Hub, please contact Dr. Ceril Jones (ceril.jones@reading.ac.uk).

24th February 2003 - Russell Walke joins Quintessa

Quintessa is pleased to welcome Russell Walke to the Henley-on-Thames office. Russell trained in environmental technology and biology and has spent over three years working as an environmental consultant. During this time he has specialised in the environmental assessment of radioactive waste management and disposal facilities and radioactively contaminated land, for example in support of the Dounreay Site Restoration Plan.

6th February 2003 - Koji Hane

Quintessa is pleased to welcome Koji Hane to our Henley-on-Thames office. Koji is a visiting engineer from Kajima Corporation in Japan attached to Quintessa for two years. Previously, Koji had been working for Kajima for 8 years where he was involved in the design of underground structures, numerical analyses for rock mechanics, and conceptual designs for a HLW repository in Japan. While at Quintessa he will be developing performance assessment models for HLW disposal.

23rd January 2003 - John Rees joins Quintessa as an associate consultant

Quintessa is pleased to welcome John Rees as an associate consultant. John has over twenty years experience as a consultant in all the main aspects of the management of radioactive wastes. This includes multi-disciplinary technical work associated with all the main stages in the life cycle of the wastes: their treatment, packaging, storage and final disposal. Nowadays, he integrates these skills in assessing the safety performance of particular types of waste package throughout the complete life cycle in order to provide advice on optimising their short-term management. John is also a fully trained and experienced safety assessor for nuclear plant to NII standards, and has carried out projects on a wide range of such facilities. Activities have included leading HAZOPs, conducting risk assessments, writing safety cases and peer reviewing. In recent years, he has helped to develop thinking in the UK on evaluating integrated routes for managing radioactive wastes over their entire life cycle. This includes issues concerning public perception of radwaste management routes and stakeholder views, as well as matters to do with technology, regulation and cost. Associated with this have been projects concerned with identifying the Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) and Best Practicable Means (BPM) for managing particular wastes, or groups of wastes. He works regularly at the policy, strategy and technical levels, and is able to integrate them effectively.

13th January 2003 - Quintessa launches new online-modelling website

Quintessa has launched a new website, quintessa-online (www.quintessa-online.com). Quintessa-online is an initiative designed to explore the benefits of making scientific modelling tools available on the internet. Online modelling can:

enable large numbers of people to interact with scientific models;
allow users to access models that are frequently updated with new data or algorithms.

News in 2003