In the aftermath of the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl in Russia, at the Three Mile Island reactor in the United States and the nuclear criticality accident at the Tokai-mura JCO in Japan, the need for serious attention has been directed toward response planning for nuclear emergencies. Currently Taiwan has one of the highest population densities in the world. To handle energy needs, there are three nuclear facilities. Recently the first serious electrical failure occurred at the third nuclear reactor (3A). This incident in particular brought the need for proper measures to handle accidents to the attention of the public. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of the national planning for handling nuclear emergencies under the existing laws for nuclear accident emergency response and the laws for disaster prevention at the local government level. Attention is given to the capability of the design and organizational system for handling nuclear emergencies and whether this plan can be realized in actual practice. Having reached a thorough understanding through the analysis, the paper makes suggestions about the procedures to be followed for the national government¡¦s handling of nuclear plant emergencies.

Large-scale radiological accidents have resulted in intakes of radioactive materials by members of the public and occupational radiation workers. However, current methods to evaluate intakes are designed for small numbers of individuals and cannot be easily scaled for large populations as has occurred. A proposed method for high throughput volumes of people to identify and quantify intakes of radioactive material through urine radiobioassay is described. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The MCNP V6.0 software code was used to model the General Electric Hawkeye V3 Gamma Camera for gamma ray efficiency. Technitium-99m was used to validate the model. The model was used to calculate detection efficiencies and minimum detectable doses for Cobalt-60, Iodine-131, Cesium-137/Barium-137m and Iridium-192. RESULTS: Differences of 8% were observed between measurements of the detection efficiency for Technitium-99m and the MCNP modeled detection efficiency (11.1% vs. 12.0%, respectively). Calculations showed that a dose of 20 mSv could be detected using urine radiobioassay in 6, 3, 2, and 20 days post incident for Type F intakes of Cobalt-60, Iodine-131, Cesium-137/Barium-137m and Iridium-192 respectively. Approximately 1,152 urine samples could be analyzed in an eight-hour shift using a single gamma camera. CONCLUSIONS: The use of the gamma camera for urine radiobioassay allows for high throughput volumes of samples and has sufficient detection sensitivity to meet dose-based decision guidelines.