Using Oceanography To Control And Forecast Nuclear Accidents And Other Passive Particles Problems

This article is the last improved version of a previously published model [18] for the transport of the nuclear contamination and other passive particles in the ocean. Two interesting advances have been developed during last two years for my PhD thesis to be finished in the next months: (a) A Suspended Particulate Matter (S.P.M.) sub-model, including erosion, transport and sedimentation. (b) A new advection-diffusion approach with numerical and computational improvements: Finite Elements (FE), Finite Differences (FD) and Monte Carlo (MC) methods have been compared and calibrated. These studies will be submitted to two different scientific journals to become an added guarantee of my PhD work. The Baltic Sea has been elected as the validation scenario of the model and the radioisotope Cs137 is the radiotracer to be analysed. This scenario was the most contaminated ecosystem out of the Soviet Union due to the Chernobyl accident occurred at the end of April 1986, and the elected radiotracer Cs137 was the main long-lived radioisotope emitted to the environment. However, an important aim of this model is its potential usefulness in other oceanic scenarios affected by a nuclear disaster in the future. It could be an interesting tool to predict and minimize the ecological and economical impacts of future accidents. This model can also be extended easily to non-nuclear contamination problems such as: oil accidents, nutrients dynamics and other biological problems.