Study on source inversion technology for nuclear accidents based on gaussian puff model and ENKF

For nuclear power plant (NPP) accident, the assessment of the radiation consequences plays an important role in the emergency response system. However, the source characteristics which greatly influence thhe accuracy of the assessment result is poorly known or even unknown at the early phase of accident, wich can cause poorly understanding of the situation and delay the response activities. In this paper, source inversion technology in analyzing nuclear accidents based on Gaussian puff model and ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is proposed. The method is validated with simulated measurements and the results show that it can give reasonable estimations of the change in release rate and height simultaneously, though the first guess of release rate is 10 larger than the true value. The investigation of the influence of sharp change in source term shows that the method is robust to capture the sharp change, but there is a delay of response when the release height increases simultaneously.