RADIOLOGICAL EMISSIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING FOR BROOKHAV EN NATIONAL LABORATORY, 1947 - 1961.

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has monitored its releases to the environment since its inception in 1947. From 1962 to 1966 and from 1971 to the present, annual reports,were published that recorded the emissions and releases to the environment from Laboratory operations. In 1998, a report was written to summarize the environmental data for the years 1967 to 1970. One of the purposes of the current report is to complete BNL's environmental history by covering the period from 1948 through 1961. The activities in 1947 were primarily organizational and there is no information on the use of radiation at the Laboratory before 1948. An additional objective of this report is to provide environmental data to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The report does not provide an estimate of the doses associated with BNL operations. The report is comprised of two parts. The first part is a summary of emissions, releases, and environmental monitoring information including a discussion of the uncertainties in these data. Part two contains the detailed information on the approach taken to estimate the releases from the fuel cartridge failures at the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor (BGRR). A series of appendices present more detailed information on these events in tabular form. The approach in this report is to be reasonable, conservative, (pessimistic), and transparent in estimating releases from fuel cartridge ruptures. Clearly, reactor stack monitoring records and more extensive records would have greatly improved this effort, but in accordance with Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Appendix 0230 Annex C-9, many of the detailed records from this time were not retained