PRELIMINARY MODEL OF PLUTONIUM TRANSPORT BY WIND AT
TRINITY SITE
A. F. Gallegos
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Los Alamos,
New Mexico
ABSTRACT
A preliminary analysis of available data from Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory ground zero (GZ) study area at Trinity Site is discussed in
an effort to develop a wind-driven plutonium transport model.
The
analysis reveals a dominant effect of precipitation in explaining variation in the data, although its product with normalized solar radiation
pattern gives a much lower sum of squared residuals (SSR) from the
regression line.
The square of the average diurnal windspeed at the
site was also observed to reduce the SSR further, but not to the extent
expected relative to other factors.
Failure to find significant plutonium concentration differences in collected dust (as a function of time
and sampling height of Bagnold sampler collectors) made possible the
formulation of a prediction equation for plutonium flux at GZ, using the
product of the predicted dust flux at the site with the mean plutonium
concentration for the dust samples analyzed.
INTRODUCTION
An objective of the Trinity Site studies is to characterize environmental
transport processes governing the distribution of plutonium initially
deposited as a result of fallout from the atomic bomb test in 1945
(Larson et al., 1951; Hakonson and Johnson, 1974).
Studies were begun
on wind-driven soil transport processes using Bagnold dust samplers.
This report summarizes dust flux data for ground zero (GZ) site location
1.6 km northeast of the Trinity crater along the fallout pathway, and
examines the relationship between soil flux and plutonium flux, as well
as other environmental parameters, using analysis of variance and regression analysis methods.
681