Propagation Simulation of Radioactive Particles from Nuclear Bombs with HYSPLIT Software

Today, terrorism is a serious threat to all societies. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by these groups will pose serious problems for global security. Therefore, studying the methods of passive nuclear defense against nuclear attacks and predicting the direction of radioactive materials can increase the preparedness of society against such attacks and save the lives of many people. Numerous pieces of software have been developed to simulate the release of radioactive material from nuclear weapons and nuclear power plant accidents. The HYSPLIT model is one of the most efficient models in this field. This model has the ability to simulate meteorological with data from different centers. In this research, this model along with meteorological data (GDAS) has been used to simulate the release of radioactive material caused by the explosion of atomic bombs in north of Iran. In this simulation, it is assumed that the atomic cloud resulting from the explosion is composed of 13 particles of different sizes. The results show that the model is well able to simulate the direction of propagation and increasing the size of the bomb will increases the distance of propagation and has no effect on the direction of propagation. Small bomb simulations also give more consistent results.