Abstract
Simulation using a mercury environmental fate model is useful and usually required to estimate mercury environmental risk. Because environmental fate of mercury species depends on physical, chemical, biological reactions, models include many parameters. In addition, some parameters like biomagnification factor are reported in several orders of magnitude wide ranges depending on local and/or specific environments. This means that simulations using mercury environmental fate models inevitably include great uncertainty because it is greatly difficult to assess representativeness of parameter values. In this study, uncertainty of model parameters are quantified by evaluating the most appropriate statistical distributions based on Bayesian information criterion. After identification of the best statistical distributions, parameters were discretized. Mercury exposure to human bodies were estimated using a mercury environmental fate model with initial condition of constant mercury load (1.0 g-Hg/yr) to semi-closed wet area. In the case of 10-year mercury emission, mercury exposures were estimated in the 95 percentile range of 8.94x10-6-53.1 μg-Hg/person/week. When mercury environmental risk is not negligible, its probability was estimated to be 1.78%. Because the new method suggested in this paper will not require representativeness verification of model parameter values and can give easily understandable score on environmental risk concern, it might be useful to support policy makers and promote building public acceptance on mercury problems like final disposal.
