The Iran War and Barakah
Figure 1. Barakah plant in the UAE
The Iran War raises the real possibility that the Iranians either through desperation or lack of central control go after the Barakah nuclear plant in the UAE.
It is essential that somebody has a good plume model and a good radiation harm model ready to go or the panicked response will multiply the actual harm many times.
But it is better not to do the plume modeling at all than to do it poorly, using either a bad plume model (MACCS2) or a harm model that is biological nonsense (LNT). To do it with either MACCS2 or LNT would make the response even worse.
I don’t know of any organization that has that combination ready to go. That’s a criminal failing of our current system.
Dear Jack: Based on the analysis of M. Herschel Specter, the likelihood of any plume event from an attack on al-Barakah is extremely low. Central to his analysis are the extreme safety margins that have been built into modern nuclear power reactors with large dry containments. We are *not* talking about Chernobyl, which lacked a containment and generated a radioactive plume.
Please see Herschel's 2019 analysis "Become a Nuclear Safety Expert, Rev. 2" at https://www.nuceng.ca/refer/Specter-2019.pdf. The physics of modern light water reactors argue against plume dispersal because the radioactive material of concern tends to "plate out" while inside the containment, based on Sandia Labs analysis.
In the summer of 1967 I worked on dispersal of "air pollution" plumes and got curious about the concentrations measured in "dosages", so I looked at the original papers -- they were all Declassified but it was pretty clear who wanted to know how well "pollution" plumes could be predicted, and why. The good news is, we found that the answer to the real question was, "BAD IDEA!" -- you can't predict worth a damn.