A new version of the ERICA tool to facilitate impact assessments of radioactivity on wild plants and animals

TLDR

The ERICA Tool was updated to version 1.2 in November 2014, marking its first major revision since 2007. This article outlines the key features of that update. The update incorporates new transfer databases derived from an international compilation of concentration ratios, revised extrapolation methods for missing data, and Bayesian updating to include otherwise excluded information, prompting revisions to Tier 1 Environmental Media Concentration Limits. The article highlights the most significant changes to the EMCLs resulting from these updates.

Abstract

A new version of the ERICA Tool (version 1.2) was released in November 2014; this constitutes the first major update of the Tool since release in 2007. The key features of the update are presented in this article. Of particular note are new transfer databases extracted from an international compilation of concentration ratios (CRwo-media) and the modification of ‘extrapolation’ approaches used to select transfer data in cases where information is not available. Bayesian updating approaches have been used in some cases to draw on relevant information that would otherwise have been excluded in the process of deriving CRwo-media statistics. All of these efforts have in turn led to the requirement to update Environmental Media Concentration Limits (EMCLs) used in Tier 1 assessments. Some of the significant changes with regard to EMCLs are highlighted.