Publications Details
Overview of MACCS and MACCS2 development efforts
The MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System (MACCS), publicly distributed since 1987, was developed to estimate the potential impacts to the surrounding public of severe accidents at nuclear power plants. The principal phenomena considered in MACCS are atmospheric transport and deposition under time-variant meteorology, short-term and long-term mitigative actions and exposure pathways, deterministic and stochastic health effects, and economic costs of mitigative actions. At this time, no other publicly available code in the US offers all these capabilities. MACCS2 represents a major enhancement of the capabilities of its predecessor MACCS. MACCS2 was developed as a general-purpose analytical tool applicable to diverse reactor and nonreactor Department of Energy (DOE) facilities. The MACCS2 package includes three primary enhancements: (1) a more flexible emergency response model, (2) an expanded library of radionuclides, and (3) a semidynamic food-chain model. The new code features allow detailed evaluations of risks to workers at nearby facilities on large DOE reservations and allow the user to assess the potential impacts of over 700 radionuclides that cannot be considered with MACCS.