Airborne Radioactive Contamination in Inhabited Areas - Volume 15

Traditionally, urban radioecology has had much less attention than agricultural radioecology.

Actually, this is the first ever holistic "guidebook" on the topic.

This is in spite of the fact that some 260,000 persons were removed from their homes after the Chernobyl accident, to some extent because of the consequences of the contamination were not fully understood.

Naturally the social and economical repercussions were immense.

Also in the context of meeting the current threat of terrorist attacks, in the form of so-called 'dirty bombs' (radioactivity dispersion devices), a thorough understanding of the potential problems in a contaminated residential complex is essential.

The various conceivable sources of contamination of residential areas are discussed, focusing on airborne dispersion.

On this background, the relevant processes of deposition and resuspension and their implications are explained.

The contamination can lead to a multitude of different dose pathways.This calls for detailed descriptions of contributions to dose from radiation from the many different contaminated environmental surfaces indoors and outdoors, radiation from contaminations on humans and radiation from inhaled radionuclides.