Code from Belgian researcher may enforce stricter compliance with Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

The code is a collaboration between SCK CEN, Health Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and KMI. Health Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada conceived and initiated the project, SCK CEN and KMI supplied expertise and weather data for comprehensive testing of the code. Once the code had been fine-tuned, the partners decided to put this knowledge in the service of society.

Available to the public

Belgium and Canada officially announced that the code was made publicly available at the biannual meeting that took place from 8 to 18 March 2021, and where diplomats, ambassadors and scientists meet (online) to discuss verification techniques of the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. In their statement, the Canadian-Belgian delegation emphasized: “We believe that this tool is invaluable for national data centres because it will help them fulfilling the role they play in monitoring the treaty.” The code has been made public so scientists could use it and improve it. The results have also been recently published in a scientific journal.

Forest fires in Chernobyl

Sticking with the principle that ‘scientific research is never finished’, the researcher made further improvements to the code after his post-doc. The updated code explicitly maps out statistical uncertainties and does not exclude the possibility of multiple sources. “The code was designed such that we can determine how (un)certain the link is between the values measures and the source found. For policy-makers, this is crucial information. Moreover, the code no longer excludes the possibility of multiple ‘sources’,” says the researcher. He illustrates the latter by means of the forest fires in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station – the station where the most serious nuclear disaster in history occurred in 1986. The forests are still radioactive and the fires released pollutants into the atmosphere. “There were several hot spots and that has an impact on the radioactivity emitted. We then used the code to predict fairly accurately what course the plumes of smoke would take and whether we were staying below the safety standard for the population,” concludes De Meutter (SCK CEN).