Background in the context of land contaminated with naturally occurring radioactive material
David Read
G.D. Read
M.C. Thorne
2134/16373
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Background_in_the_context_of_land_contaminated_with_naturally_occurring_radioactive_material/9395267
The financial implications of choosing a particular threshold for clearance of
radioactively contaminated land are substantial, particularly when one considers
the volume of naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) created each
year by the production and combustion of fossil fuels and the exploitation
of industrial minerals. Inevitably, a compromise needs to be reached between
the level of environmental protection sought and the finite resources available
for remediation. In the case of natural series radionuclides, any anthropogenic
input is always superimposed on the inventory already present in the soil;
this ‘background’ inventory is conventionally disregarded when assessing
remediation targets. Unfortunately, the term is not well defined and the concept
of ‘background dose’ is open to alternative interpretations. In this paper, we
address the issue of natural background from a geochemical rather than from
a solely radiological perspective, illustrating this with an example from the
china clay industry. We propose a simple procedure for decision making
based on activity concentrations of primordial radionuclides and their progeny.
Subsequent calculations of dose need to take into account the mineralogical and
chemical characteristics of the contamination, which in the case of NORM are
invariably reflected in uranium series disequilibrium.
2014-11-26 14:41:50
untagged
Chemical Sciences not elsewhere classified