Annual emission totals of 14CO2 from nuclear facilities

Annual emission totals of 14CO2 in GBq from nuclear power plants and reprocessing facilities for the years 2006-2022. The dataset has the following sources: Facilities in countries within the EU are collected from the European Commission Radioactive Discharges Database (RADD) (https://europa.eu/radd/). Switzerland's data is from the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI). The data was extracted from their Radiological Protection annual reports, which can be accessed here: https://www.ensi.ch/en/documents/document-category/jahresberichte-ensi/. Choose "Emissions" in the topic dropdown of the search interface. UK facilities ceased reporting to RADD after the year 2019. For later years, the data is from the RIFE (Radioactivity in Food and the Environment) annual reports which are prepared on behalf of the UK Environment Agency. They can be accessed here: https://www.food.gov.uk/search?keywords=RIFE. Ukraine and Russia have no such reports. Instead, the method based on emission factors outlined in Zazzeri et al., 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2018.42) was employed: "Emission factor-based estimates in TBq/yr are calculated by multiplying the standard emission factors in Table 1 by the power production values from the IAEA PRIS Database." The IAEA PRIS database can be accessed here: https://pris.iaea.org/ Regardless of the source of the data, all facilities with pressurized water reactors (PWRs) are expected to release only 28% of the 14C as 14CO2 and the values were adjusted accordingly: "A fraction of 72% of 14C released as CH4 from the PWRs has been used in the estimation, with all other 14C released in the form of CO2" (Zazzeri et al., 2018). The only exception is for the RADD data in the case of other information provided in the column “CHEMICAL_FORM_COMMENT”. Preliminary emissions for 2022 are included (data as of 2023-10-27), with reported or inferred emissions for 42 out of 88 facilities. For the remaining 46 facilities, emission values for 2021 are used: RADD is still missing entries from the 18 German facilities, 2 Finnish facilities, and one Bulgarian facility. Ukraine has not reported energy production to the IAEA PRIS for the year 2021. The 2022 report for Switzerland has not yet been released. The 2022 report for the UK has not yet been released. The data accessible here can be used to estimate these facilities' expected influence on the Δ14C at locations with STILT footprints in a notebook on ICOS Jupyter Hub. To use the specific notebook where this is possible, follow this link: https://exploredata.icos-cp.eu/hub/user-redirect/lab/tree/icos_jupyter_notebooks/radiocarbon.ipynb. You can request a password for this service here: https://www.icos-cp.eu/data-services/tools/jupyter-notebook/exploredata-password. Observe that once you log out from exploredata, any changes will automatically be dropped.