ReCLAIM v2.0: Comparison of Calculated Doses With Other Assessment Tools When Emulating Contaminated Land Scenarios Available to Purchase

ReCLAIM v2.0 is a software tool designed to calculate doses to exposure groups from radioactively contaminated land including UK Nuclear Licensed Sites. When using tools to undertake contaminated land assessments, it is important to understand the functionality of the tool and how the tool should be best used to undertake an assessment. This work describes the results from inter-comparison of ReCLAIM v2.0 with two other radioactively contaminated land tools (Conland and RCLEA). For the majority of cases there was little difference between ReCLAIM v2.0 and the other tools. In all cases where there were significant differences, the cause of the variation could be explained and quantified. In the majority of these cases the main exposure pathway was external irradiation. In these cases, variations in the calculated doses were due to the differing ways in which underpinning shielding calculations were undertaken to calculate external radiation dose coefficients. The effect was most noticeable for radionuclides emitting high energy penetrating radiation such as Co-60, Cs-134 and Cs+137. For these cases, there was a greater difference of up to around 60% in the dose comparisons between ReCLAIM v2.0 and the alternative tools, with ReCLAIM v2.0 being more conservative. These results demonstrate that where the algorithms and parameter values are similar, different tools will produce similar results. The user of such tools should be aware of cases where different results may be produced in order that an appropriate level of confidence can be assigned when making decisions based upon the results.