English Abstract In the frame of a national program on emergency
response planning and preparedness for a nuclear accident (PKOB) an
Information and Documentation Centre (IDC) has been developed at the RIVM.
This IDC projects for instance the effective dose equivalent due to
radionuclides that may be released during a nuclear accident. One of the
tools in use is an air transport model. To direct the attention to the most
significant radionuclides, as far as the dose to the population due to
internal radiation after inhalation and external radiation is concerned, and
to speed up calculations, a method was developed to sort the 54 most
important radionuclides from a nuclear release according to their
contribution to dose. This method that has been turned into a spreadsheet
model is described here. Also an outline is given that was used for the
implementation of the method within the IDC on a HP-9000/370 computer.
Using the 'radionuclide reduction' method it can be shown that for source
terms of different types of accidents a quite different set of radionuclides
is of importance for the effective dose equivalent during or after the
passage of a cloud of radioactive material. Another result is that on the
short term (upto a few days) the set of seven radionuclides that contribute
the most to the effective dose equivalent (during or after passage) is not
significantly influenced by the transport time of the cloud of radioactive
material to the location where the dose is delivered.
