[Personal computer interactive algorithm for estimating radiologic contamination and doses after a nuclear accident...

The algorithm RANA (radiological assessment of nuclear accidents) is a tool which can be exploited to estimate the space and time structure of the radiological consequences of a radioactive release following a nuclear accident in Europe. The algorithm, formulated in the language of Mathematica, can be run on a personal computer. It uses simplified physical assumptions as for the the diffusion of the cloud and the transfer of the contamination to the food chain. The user gets the needed information by means of interactive windows that allow a fast evaluation of dose and contamination profiles. Calculations are performed either starting from the source terms or from the knowledge of experimental contamination data. Radiological consequences, such as individual or collective doses from several exposure paths, are parametrized in terms of the atmospheric diffusion categories.