• Proceedings of the Korean Radioactive Waste Society Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.126-133
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• 2005

Securing of radioactive waste disposal site and the related operations for disposal of low and intermediate level radioactive waste is being actively carried out in Korea. For disposal of radioactive wastes, physicochemical and radiological status and integrity of radioactive wastes must be secured first. Also, waste generators must provide this information to disposers. In addition, to secure the safety of waste disposal, waste acceptance criteria (WAC) and site specific waste acceptance criteria (SWAC) to consider characteristics of the disposal site are required. Radioactive wastes must be processed, generated, managed and transferred in accordance with these criteria. [1] For this, evaluation of properties on each of the radioactive wastes must be performed. However, in reality, atomic power plants are experiencing difficulties in relation to this due to the large quantity of radioactive waste generation. In order to solve this problem, IAEA and major overseas countries have developed, thus are using waste certification program (WCP) and quality assurance program (QAP) [2,3]. On the basis of these programs, radioactive waste certification program has been developed for safe disposal of radioactive wastes in Korea to satisfy the provisions specified in 'low and intermediate level radioactive waste transfer guidelines' of announcement No. 2005-18 from the Ministry of Science and Technology and specific site waste acceptance criteria (tentative plan). In addition, it is being planned to administer amendment on commercial atomic power plant related procedures and ensile staff training in order for early introduction and operation of radioactive waste certification system.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.75-80
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• 2011

Purpose: Europe and U.S use multi-bed therapy rooms. Hereupon, this study aims to examine the safety when current one-bed therapy rooms in Seoul National University Hospital is changed into two-bed ones. Materials and Methods: This study evaluated external exposure by gamma radiation emitted from other patients and internal and external exposure caused by pollutions from other patients in case that Seoul National University Hospital installs a shielding wall between beds in existing therapy rooms. Results: When internal and external exposure was evaluated to evaluate safety of two-bed hospital rooms, 'isolation amount of patients' 5mSv exposure or below is received according to the Atomic Energy Act. Conclusion: With the increasing number of patients with thyoid cancer, patients using therapy rooms are on the rise. Therefore, improving one-person therapy rooms to two-person ones in line with international trend would increase cost reduction and management efficiency, and patients' alienation and isolation can be reduced to increase healing effects.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.61-73
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• 2017

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in 2011 and California Power Failure in 2001 are examples of the importance of the power plant safety management that caused huge national loss with a power-related mass casualty incident. In a situation where humans cannot live without electricity, efforts to strengthen the systematic firefighting safety management in power plants that produce electricity with large amounts of hazardous materials as fuel, such as nuclear energy, coal and gas, are essential to protect life and prevent property loss and stable economic growth from fire explosion accident or radiation leak due to the negligence of safety management and natural disasters such as earthquakes, which has recently become an issue. This study examined the operating situation of firefighting safety management in power plants with firefighting officials employed by five power generation companies including Korea Southern Power Co., Ltd. and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. Ltd., which are in charge of the domestic power supply. As a result, for the systematic firefighting safety management of power plants, improvement plans were drawn, including the development of an effective business manual and a comprehensive management system, the substantiality of firefighting safety education, and the strengthening of seismic designs to prepare for earthquakes.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.37-51
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• 2009

The nuclear power industry in the world has recognized the importance of integrating non-technical and team skills training with the technical training given to its control room operators to reduce human errors since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. The Nuclear power plant (NPP) industry in Korea has been also making efforts to reduce the human errors which largely have contributed to 120 nuclear reactor trips from the year 2001 to 2006. The Crew Resource Management (CRM) training was one of the efforts to reduce the human errors in the nuclear power industry. The CRM was developed as a response to new insights into the causes of aircraft accidents which followed from the introduction of flight recorders and cockpit voice recorders into modern jet aircraft. The CRM first became widely used in the commercial airline industry, but military aviation, shipboard crews, medical and surgical teams, offshore oil crews, and other high-consequence, high-risk, time-critical industry teams soon followed. This study aims to develop a CRM training program that helps to improve plant performance by reducing the number of reactor trips caused by the operators' errors in Korean NPP. The program is; firstly, based on the work we conducted to develop a human factors training from the applications to the Nuclear Power Plant; secondly, based on a number of guidelines from the current practicable literature; thirdly, focused on team skills, such as leadership, situational awareness, teamwork, and communication, which have been widely known to be critical for improving the operational performance and reducing human errors in Korean NPPs; lastly, similar to the event-based training approach that many researchers have applied in other domains: aircraft, medical operations, railroads, and offshore oilrigs. We conducted an experiment to test effectiveness of the CRM training program in a condition of simulated control room also. We found that the program made the operators' attitudes and behaviors be improved positively from the experimental results. The more implications of the finding were discussed further in detail.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2016.05a
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• pp.213-213
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• 2016

수문조사기기의 검정은 수문조사에 활용할 기기를 일관되고 표준화된 기준으로 검사하여 수문조사에 적합한 기기인지 확인하는 것이다. 이러한 검정은 국가수문자료의 신뢰도를 높이고 유지하는 기본적이고 중요한 업무이다. 검정대상기기는 강수량측정기기, 유속측정기기, 수위측정기기, 부유사측정기기, 토양수분측정기기, 증발산량측정기기로 총 6가지이며, 2009년부터 국토교통부 위탁사업으로 한국건설기술연구원(유량조사사업단)에서 수행하고 있다. 특히 유량조사사업단에서는 유속측정기기를 제외한 나머지 5개 수문조사기기에 대해 검정을 수행하고 있다. 연도별로 2009년부터 2015년까지 98대, 334대, 572대, 539대, 359대, 682대, 690대로 총 3,274대를 검정하였고, 관측기종별로 강수량 1,579대, 수위 1,589대 부유사 23대, 토양수분 33대, 증발산량 50대이다. 신청기관별로는 국토교통부(홍수통제소) 1,847대, 환경부(국립환경과학원) 4대, 한국건설기술연구원(유량조사사업단 포함) 81대, K-water 338대, 한국수력원자력(주) 91대, 일반업체 913대에 대한 검정을 실시하였다. 검정을 실시한 강수량측정기기 1,579대 중 보정없이 합격된 기기는 1,495대, 허용오차기준에 미달되어 보정 실시 후 합격한 기기는 76대이며, 불합격 처리된 기기는 8대이다. 수위측정기기는 합격이 1,586대, 기준에 미달되어 불합격된 기기가 2대로 나타났다. 강수량측정기기의 각 연도대비 통계분석 결과 보정률은 2009년 97대 중 8대(8.2%), 2010년 194대 중 3대(1.5%), 2011년 180대 중 24대(13.3%), 2012년 175대 중 17대(9.7%), 2013년 165대 중 15대(9.1%), 2014년 547대 중 8대(1.5%), 2015년 221대 중 9대(4.1%)로 다소 낮은 수치로 나타났다. 이처럼 보정률이 낮게 나타난 이유는 관할기관의 검정을 위한 유지관리 및 사업자의 사전검사 등을 통해 감소한 것으로 판단되며, 이와 같은 결과는 수문자료의 품질 및 신뢰도 향상으로 이어졌다. 그러나 여전히 선진국에 비해 수문조사기기 검정의 중요성에 대한 인프라 구축이 미흡한 실정이다. 수문조사기기 검정의 선진국이라 할 수 있는 미국의 경우 USGS에서 HIF(Hydrogical Istrumentation Facility)라는 별도 조직을 운영하여 관측기기의 렌탈, 수리, 교정 및 검정, 개발, 교육 등 이러한 작업을 일괄 수행하고 있고 조직 내 자체 시설로 수중펌프 시험소, 자연과 유사한 환경에서 테스트 하는 장소, 대형온도챔버 등을 갖추고 있으며, 이러한 시설을 이용하여 기기의 교정 및 검정, 연구 등을 현장과 비슷한 환경에서 다양한 실험을 통해 검정방법을 비교, 분석하는 것을 볼 수 있다. 현재 우리나라의 수문조사기기는 다양한 방법으로 현장에 설치되어 검정방법의 다양성이 요구된다. 향후 우리나라도 HIF와 같이 다양하고 선진화된 시설과 기술을 개선하고 다각적인 시험 과정을 통해 수준 높은 검정방법체계를 갖추려는 노력이 필요하다.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.189-197
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• 2019

HLW (High Level Radioactive Waste) is one of the problems that must be solved in the countries that implement nuclear power generation. Most countries that are concerned about HLW treatment are considering complete isolation from human society by disposing them deep underground. For perfect isolation, understanding the characteristics of underground rocks is very important. In particular, understanding the characteristics of discontinuity as a path way is one of the first things in order to predict the movement of exposed nuclear species to the surface. In this study, we used 500m underground core samples obtained from granite and gneiss area. The purpose of this study is to understand the characteristics of the discontinuities in each rock type and to analyze the properties of the joints in the underground relative to the surrounding environment. For this purpose, the types of discontinuities were classified and the distribution of each discontinuity were analyzed through visual analysis of the each sample obtained at 500m underground. This study can be used as a basic data for understanding the properties of discontinuities in the rock of the survey area and it can be also used as an important data for understanding the distribution characteristics of discontinuities according to the rock types.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.76-87
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• 2021

In this study, temporal trend of researches in earthquake with groundwater level, water quality, radon, remote sensing, electrical resistivity, gravity, and geomagnetism was searched from 2001 to 2020, using the journals indexed in Web of Science, and the number of articles published in international journals was counted in relation to the occurrences of earthquakes (≥Mw 5.0, ≥Mw 6.0, ≥Mw 7.0, ≥Mw 8.0, and ≥Mw 9.0). The number of articles shows an increasing trend over the studied period. This is explained by that studies on earthquake precursor and seismic monitoring becomes active in various fields with integrated data analysis through the development of remote sensing technology, progress of measurement equipment, and big data. According to Mann-Kendall and Sen's tests, gravity-related articles exhibit an increasing trend of 1.30 articles/yr, radon-related articles (0.60 articles/yr), groundwater-related articles (0.70 articles/yr), electrical resistivity-related articles (0.25 articles/yr), and remote-sensing-related articles (0.67 articles/yr). By cross-correlation analysis of the number of articles in each field with removing trend effect and the number of earthquakes of ≥Mw 5.0, ≥Mw 6.0, ≥Mw 7.0, ≥Mw 8.0, and ≥Mw 9.0, radon and remote sensing fields exhibit a high cross-correlation with a delay time of one year. In addition, large-scale earthquakes such as the 2004 and 2005 Sumatra earthquake, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the 2010 Chile earthquake are estimated to be related with the increase in the number of articles in the corresponding periods.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.165-175
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• 2022

Earthquakes have occurred owing to movements on a fault since several billion years ago. Research on the relationship between earthquakes and groundwater began in the 1960s in the United States, but related works, including hydrogeochemistry research, only began in the 2010s in South Korea. In this study, domestic studies on the relationship between earthquakes and groundwater until 2021 were collected from the Web of Science and characterized by subject area (groundwater level, hydrogeochemistry, combination of the two, and others). The results showed that the number of published articles per year was positively correlated with the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, 2016 Gyeongju earthquake, and 2017 Pohang earthquake, with the maximum numbers observed in 2011, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Most studies on the relationship between earthquakes and groundwater level addressed groundwater level fluctuations in the duration of the subject earthquake, with little consideration of the precursors. Groundwater level monitoring data, as well as hydrogeochemical information and microbial communities, may contribute to a more detailed understanding of groundwater flow and chemical reactions in bedrock caused by earthquakes. Therefore, the establishment of a national groundwater monitoring network for seismic monitoring and prediction is required.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.405-419
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• 2022

Flood frequency analysis commonly used to design the hydraulic structures to minimize flood damage includes uncertainty. Therefore, the most appropriate design flood within a uncertainty should be selected in the final stage of a hydraulic structure, but related studies were rarely carried out. The total expected cost function introduced into the flood frequency analysis is a new approach for determining the optimal design flood. This procedure has been used as UNCODE (UNcertainty COmpliant DEsign), but the application has not yet been introduced in South Korea. This study introduced the mathematical procedure of UNCODE and calculated the optimal design flood using the annual maximum inflow of hydroelectric dams located in the Bukhan River system and results were compared with that of the existing flood frequency. The parameter uncertainty was considered in the total expected cost function using the Gumbel and the GEV distribution, and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm was used to sample the parameters. In this study, cost function and damage function were assumed to be a first-order linear function. It was found that the medians of the optimal design flood for 4 Hydroelectric dams, 2 probability distributions, and 2 return periods were calculated to be somewhat larger than the design flood by the existing flood frequency analysis. In the future, it is needed to develop the practical approximated procedure to UNCODE.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.611-626
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• 2023

Overseas examples of the characterization stage of site selection proposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency were reviewed to highlight the factors necessary for consideration in the deep disposal of high-level radioactive waste. Studies in Sweden, Finland, the USA, and Canada were considered. Site investigations in Sweden and Finland commonly covered the fields of geology, hydrogeology, and hydrogeochemistry using similar field investigation techniques. The USA considered survey groups and factors under pre- and post-lockdown guidelines, as well as those for desaturated and saturated surveys. involving geophysical, hydrological, hydrogeological, hydrogeochemical, mechanical/physical, and thermal-characterization investigations. Canada provided a list of investigative methods for both preliminary and detailed site assessments including geological, physical, boring, hydrological, laboratory testing, and chemical analysis studies. Results of this study should elucidate site-selection investigation factors and survey methods applicable to Korea.