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A Natural Analogue Approach for Estimating the Health Risks from Release and Migration of Radionuclides from Radioactive Waste.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2011

Thomas L. Gilbert
Thomas L. Gilbert*
Affiliation:
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A. Research sponsored by Oak Ridge Operations, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. W-31-109-ENG-38.
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Abstract

The health risks from radioactive waste may be expressed as a sum of products of transfer factors that characterize the causal chain of events between disposal of radionuclides in a waste field and the consequent health effects. “Model” estimates for the transfer factors are commonly obtained by modeling transport and other mechanisms in the subsystems that form the links in the causal chain. “Natural” estimates of some transfer factors for naturally occurring radionuclides can be obtained from data on the concentrations of naturally occurring radionuclides in soil, food, and the human body. These “model” and “natural” estimates can be used with scaling procedures to estimate the uncertainties and to obtain better estimates of the transfer factors. The scaling procedures take into account the differences in the source characteristics for radionuclides in a waste field of limited size and for radionuclides generally distributed in the natural environment. The ratios of the natural estimates to the model estimates for several transfer factors and several radionuclides belonging to the U-238 decay series have been determined. These ratios range from 1/8 to 4/1 for food-concentration/sourceconcentration transfer factors for the food pathways and from 1 to 77 for dose-rate/source-concentration transfer factors for the internal radiation dose pathways to various organs.

Type
Research Article
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 26: Symposium D – Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management VII , 1983 , 935
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 1984

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References

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