Assessment and input to risk management

This chapter presents an assessment of the risk of radiological impact on humans as a consequence of the potential release of radioactive material. Although it is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive risk assessment of all potential environmental and human impacts from all scenarios of radioactive releases in Arctic marine and terrestrial realms, we are able to focus on one major set of risks. These are risks to humans associated with potential releases along the major Siberian rivers—the Ob′ and Yenesei—including an assessment of how global warming may affect the consequences. Section 6.1 is an introduction to the assessment, while various scenarios are described in Section 6.2. Section 6.3 describes how dose models are formulated and implemented. The results of risk assessment modeling are provided in Section 6.4. Section 6.5 presents a summary and major conclusions.