MACCS2 development and verification efforts
MACCS2 represents a major enhancement of the capabilities of its predecessor MACCS, the MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System. MACCS, released in 1987, was developed to estimate the potential impacts to the surrounding public of severe accidents at nuclear power plants. The principal phenomena considered in MACCS/MACCS2 are atmospheric transport and deposition under time-variant meteorology, short-term and long-term mitigative actions and exposure pathways, deterministic and stochastic health effects, and economic costs. MACCS2 was developed as a general-purpose analytical tool applicable to diverse reactor and nonreactor facilities. The MACCS2 package includes three primary enhancements: (1) a more flexible emergency response model, (2) an expanded library of radionuclides, and (3) a semidynamic food-chain model. In addition, errors that had been identified in MACCS version1.5.11.1 were corrected, including an error that prevented the code from providing intermediate-phase results. MACCS2 version 1.10 beta test was released to the beta-test group in May, 1995. In addition, the University of New Mexico (UNM) has completed an independent verification study of the code package. Since the beta-test release of MACCS2 version 1.10, a number of minor errors have been identified and corrected, and a number of enhancements have been added to the code package. The code enhancements added since the beta-test release of version 1.10 include: (1) an option to allow the user to input the {sigma}{sub y} and {sigma}{sub z} plume expansion parameters in a table-lookup form for incremental downwind distances, (2) an option to define different initial dimensions for up to four segments of a release, (3) an enhancement to the COMIDA2 food-chain model preprocessor to allow the user to supply externally calculated tables of tritium food-chain dose per unit deposition on farmland to support analyses of tritium releases, and (4) the capability to calculate direction-dependent doses.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 453548
- Report Number(s):
- SAND-97-0561C; CONF-9609332-1; ON: DE97004202; TRN: 97:006776
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: NRC international MACCS2 user`s group meeting, Portoroz (Slovenia), 16-19 Sep 1996; Other Information: PBD: [1997]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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