Abstract. The paper describes the input data generation for EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) procedure based on the latest US EPA methodology for case of radioactive discharges from nuclear facilities to the living environment. Previous concept of numerical dose factors (or dose coefficient) for estimation of radiation doses due to exposure to radionuclides is in the EPA model extended to the numerical risk coefficients which enable alternative estimation of risk to health from exposure to radionuclides. The main characteristics of radiological situation around the source of pollution are computed on the basis of profound analysis of radionuclides propagation in atmosphere, hydrosphere and their further food-chain transport. The risk assessment is then done such a product of the risk coefficients and the main characteristics. A special software tool was developed and is presented here enabling to distinguish between short-term acute exposure scenarios and chronic long-term processes resulting in constant concentration (e. g. annually averaged) of a radionuclide in a given environmental medium. Particular attention was dedicated to ingestion pathway where dynamic models for computation of the annual activity intakes were customised to the local Czech conditions. Two cases of one-time radioactive fallout in a certain Julian day of a year (accidental releases) and long-term continuous submersion of ecosystem into the contaminated environment (normal releases during routine nuclear power plant (NPP) operation) are described by two different ingestion algorithms.
ASSESSMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE TO RADIONUCLIDESHealth consequences of radioactive releases into the living environment cover wide range of detenriinistic and stochastic effects. The principal stochastic somatic health effects are the increased incidence of cancers in the irradiated population. One of the most important issue resulting from the EIA (Environmental impact Assessment) procedure is the cancer risk assessment. In a common practice the estimation of the cancer risk from activity intake and external exposure to emitted radiation is done according to ICRP 60 recommendation such a simple product of an estimated effective dose and so called nominal probability coefficients in Sv" 1 . The norninal values do not account for the inherent uncertainties and are based on the idealised adult population receiving a uniform dose over the whole body. Some other problems of the approach are pointed out by the ICRP itself.An alternative approach to the environmental impact assessment concentrated on the stochastic cancer risk of radioactive discharges is based on the latest US EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) methodology [1]. It provides the new sets of risk coefficients which take into account the age dependence of biological behaviour and then characterise more precisely the implications of age and gender dependencies of activity intake, metabolism, radiogenic risk and competing causes of death. For a given radionuclide and exposure...
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