“Not for Distribution, Internal Use Only”: US Energy Dept Estimated Fukushima Release Up to 10,000 Times Larger Than Nuclear Regulators Predicted — ‘Supercore’ Scenario An Underestimate?

ENEWnews.com

Ocean Plume Modeling for the Fukushima Daiichi Event (pdf) — US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, National Weather Service, Sept. 2013:

> Estimates of contamination

• “Coastal releases ignored. According to TEPCO estimates, coastal releases are 1% of atmospheric… Not important for far-field estimates (i.e., exposure for US territories)”

• “Scenarios used [are] NRC source scenario [and] DOE Supercore source scenario”

• Regarding Cs-137 release estimates, “NRC and DOE differ by three orders of magnitude” [i.e. DOE estimate is 1,000 to 9,999 times more than NRC]

• “Enormous uncertainty in total amount of contamination released at FDNPP”

• “Differences between NRC &  DOE sources are crippling from a scientific perspective”

• “DOE much too high at… JAMSTEC observation line 30km offshore [and] overestimates Cs-137 by order of magnitude [predicting a] maxima of around 100 Bq/L for Cs-137… JAMSTEC realistic contamination levels would be factor 10 smaller (10 Bq/L).”

Is DOE’s 100 Bq/L an ‘Overestimate’?