Flux of tritium from the sea to the atmosphere around a nuclear reprocessing plant: Experimental measurements and modelling for the Western English channel.

Tritium is released to the environment by nuclear industries in various forms, mainly HTO. In impact studies leading to estimated doses for the population, atmospheric discharges are mainly taken into consideration because they generally lead to values higher than those related to liquid discharges. However, the tritium released in liquid environments can be transferred to the atmosphere by evaporation and then be transported to terrestrial ecosystems by wind. This study was carried out in France near a fuel reprocessing plant (RP) which discharges tritium into the western English Channel. We highlighted the influence of a mass of water enriched with tritium on the HTO levels in atmospheric water vapour downwind through 18 field campaigns. A hydrodynamic model able to simulate tritium activity in the water was coupled with an evaporation an atmospheric transport model. It allows to reconstitute variations in atmospheric tritium on the coast, depending on liquid discharges of tritium from the reprocessing plant. On this basis, when seawater containing 20-100 Bq.L

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.