RSICC CODE PACKAGE CCC-664

1. NAME AND TITLE 
ARCON96: Code System to Calculate Atmospheric Relative Concentrations in Building Wakes. 

2. CONTRIBUTORS 
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington through the Energy Science 
and Technology Software Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 
  
3. CODING LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER 
Fortran, VisualBasic; IBM PC (C00664IBMPC00). 
 

4. NATURE OF PROBLEM SOLVED 
ARCON96 was developed to calculate relative concentrations in plumes from nuclear power 
plants at control room air intakes in the vicinity of the release point. 

5. METHOD OF SOLUTION 
ARCON96 implements a straight-line Gaussian dispersion model with dispersion coefficients 
that are modified to account for low wind meander and building wake effects. Hourly, 
normalized concentrations (X/Q) are calculated from hourly meteorological data. 
The hourly values are averaged to form X/Qs for periods ranging from 2 to 720 hours in 
duration. The calculated values for each period are used to form cumulative frequency 
distributions. 

6. RESTRICTIONS OR LIMITATIONS 
ARCON96 is a single user program. If expanded output is selected by the user, the file 
includes the hourly input and X/Qs and the intermediate computational results. 
The output file may exceed a megabyte in size. 

7. TYPICAL RUNNING TIME 
ARCON96 calculates normalized concentrations using hourly meteorological data. 
Program progress is displayed during calculations. With 100+MHz computers, five years of 
hourly data can be processed in about one minute.. 

8. COMPUTER HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS 
ARCON96 is designed for computers using a 80386 or higher processor, 640 kilobytes of 
memory with 470 kilobytes of free at run time, and a VGA color monitor. 

9. COMPUTER SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS 
MSDOS 5.1 or higher programs will also run in DOS window in Windows 3.1, Windows95, 
and Windows98. The user interface is written in VisualBasic for DOS. 
The program is written in FORTRAN and compiled with MicroSoft PowerStation Fortran. 
When using the CMD.EXD DOS window under the Windows 2000 operating system, the ARCON96 
program displays only a part of the ARCON screen. However the full-screen command.
com DOS window displays the entire screen and allows one to run ARCON96 under Windows2000. 

10. REFERENCE 
J. V. Ramsdell, Jr., and C. A. Simonen, "Atmospheric Relative Concentrations in Building 
Wakes," NUREG/CR-6331, Rev.1; PNNL-10521, Rev. 1 (May 1997). 

11. CONTENTS OF CODE PACKAGE 
Included in the package are the referenced document and one DS/HD diskette which contains 
a self-extracting, compressed DOS file. The Fortran source files, information files, a batch 
file to run the code, executables, and input/output files are all included. 
However, the Visual Basic source files are not included. 

12. DATE OF ABSTRACT 
January 1999, revised May 2002. 

KEYWORDS: AIRBORNE; CONTROL ROOM HABITABILITY; GAUSSIAN PLUME MODEL; ENVIRONMENTAL DOSE; 
NUCLIDE TRANSPORT