Evaluation of Environmental Tritium Activity Levels and the Impact on the Public Health Around the Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant after 25 Years of Operation

Abstract

The Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), the only CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) technology in Europe, is located in the southeast of Romania at the confluence of the Danube River and the Danube–Black Sea Channel, about 60 km from the Black Sea (Constanta County) and about 160 km from Bucharest. The Cernavoda NPP has two operating units of 700 MW(electric) and produces about 20% of the electric power of Romania (Unit 1 since December 1996 and Unit 2 since November 2007). The Environmental Control Laboratory (ECL) of the Cernavoda NPP, located in Cernavoda town 2 km from the Cernavoda NPP, is part of the Radiation Protection Department and is equipped with performant analyzing systems to determine the natural and artificial radionuclide levels in the environmental samples within a 30-km area around the Cernavoda NPP.

The Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring Program for the Cernavoda NPP started in 1996, and all necessary activities are performed in the ECL, which has a quality assurance program according to the appropriate international standards and is participating in many intercomparison exercises and proficiency tests to validate the analyzing methods and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the environmental program, as a mandatory condition in the certification of the ECL and the reauthorization process of the Cernavoda NPP by the Romanian regulatory body, National Commission for Nuclear Activities Control. The annual report contains all the results for the environmental radioactivity monitoring and effluent monitoring; the results of the monitoring program are annually compared with the results of the Preoperational Environmental Monitoring Program performed between 1984 and 1994. This paperwork presents the evaluation of tritium activity levels in environmental samples around the Cernavoda NPP and the impact on the public health after 25 years of operation (1996 to 2021).

Keywords:

• Tritium monitoring
• environmental levels
• CANDU
• Cernavoda NPP

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the S.N. Nuclearelectrica–Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, Romania. The authors are indebted to their colleagues and predecessors who took part in the sampling, sample preparation, analyses, and calculations over the 26-year period of the safe operation of the Cernavoda NPP.