The safety analyses of non-reactor nuclear facilities use data on resuspension in order to estimate the potential sources of airborne contamination inside the plants. Unfortunately, there are very few reliable data in the literature on resuspension factors (ratio between mass of particle in suspension and the initial amount of matter) for the cases involving nuclear fuel powders (UO2, PuO2, MOX). A common research programme between IRSN and COGEMA was elaborated in 1998 to investigate the resuspension phenomena in realistic situations. Two topics were experimentally studied: the reentrainment of particles from a pile of powder exposed to a horizontal airflow and the aerosol generated by free fall of particulate matters. In parallel, a database on resuspension factors, called BADIMIS, is developed on the bases of the data found in the literature and the results obtained in present experiments.
This work has been done with APTUS, INRS, CEA/DAM, and COGEMA.