It's been 45 years since the first emergency phone call from the Department of Energy came into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to activate a new atmospheric modeling center that predicts the effects of hazardous plumes. Listen on Apple or Spotify.
An accident had occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, that led to a release of radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
This is how LLNL's National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) was born. The story of the history and scientific exploits of NARAC is featured in the newest episode of the Big Ideas Lab podcast.
Lee Glascoe, the program leader for NARAC, said: "The next day (March 29), the Secretary of Energy contacted the director of Lawrence Livermore and asked, 'hey, I know you've been working on this technology. Can you put it into action?'"
The Livermore scientists got down to business and, for the next 10 days, worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with teams from the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies to predict the potential areas impacted and possible levels of radioactive contamination.
Three Mile Island was the first of three major nuclear power plant accidents for which NARAC has gone into operation to track radioactive materials in the atmosphere - with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011, following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami, as the others.
For Chernobyl, NARAC chief scientist John Nasstrom said: "Using weather models and our atmospheric transport models, we were able to estimate, based on the radiation levels measured in Scandinavia and parts of Europe, how much material would have been released. It was substantial. It's still the worst nuclear accident in history."
When the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident occurred in 2011, it became NARAC's largest, longest running, most intense effort in its history as the center's scientists worked in shifts round the clock, seven days a week for 22 days straight.
"We use physics-based computer modeling to predict where radioactive material might go through the atmosphere and then eventually land on the ground," said NARAC health physicist Lydia Tai, referring to the Fukushima work. "We take that calculation of material on the ground and predict how that would affect people who are living in that area."
Katie Lundquist, who heads NARAC's model development efforts, noted that one of NARAC's signal strengths is turning predictions of concentrations of hazardous materials into impacts on humans.
"A decision maker may not understand what to do with that concentration because they don't have enough expertise to understand what the impacts are," Lundquist said. "And so, most of our products, they aren't necessarily showing the concentration on the ground. They focus more on turning that concentration into the impacts on people."
Besides tracking concentrations of radioactivity from nuclear power plant accidents, NARAC has responded to many other incidents, including smaller accidents at other nuclear facilities, toxic industrial spills, fires and airborne ruthenium detected across Europe in 2017.
Tune in and turn on the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab Podcast to gain a deeper understanding of the mission of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's highly regarded NARAC. Listen on Apple or Spotify.
