[V.I.Vernadskii's theory of the biosphere and modern problems of radioecology].

The importance of Vernadsky's scientific heritage for the present stage of science development was substantiated. His role in the formation of radioecology as an independent scientific discipline was emphasized. The ecological consequences of an anthropogenic increase of the radiation background and the prospects of nuclear energy development were considered.

Radioactive Artifacts: Historical Sources of Modern Radium Contamination.

Radium has been distributed in a wide variety of devices during the early part of this century. Antique objects containing significant amounts of radium turn up at flea markets, antique shows, and antique dealers, in a variety of locations. These objects include radium in devices which were used by legitimate medical practitioners for legitimate medical purposes such as therapy, as well as a wide variety of "quack cures." These devices may contain anywhere from a few nanocuries to as much as several hundred microcuries of radium. In addition to medical sources, a large variety of scientific instruments utilize radium in luminous dials. These instruments include compasses, azimuth indicators, and virtually any object which might require some form of calibration. In addition, the consumer market utilized a large amount of radium in the production of wrist watches, pocket watches, and clocks with luminous dials. Some of these watches contained as much as 4.5 µCi of radium, and between 1913 and 1920 about 70 gm was produced for the manufacture of luminous compounds. In addition to the large amount of radium produced for scientific and consumer utilization, there were a number of materials produced which were claimed to contain radium but in fact did not, further adding to the confusion in this area. The wide availability of radium is a result of the public's great fascination with radioactivity during the early part of this century and a belief in its curative properties. A number of objects were produced in order to trap the emanations of radium in water for persons to drink in order to benefit from their healing effects. Since the late 20s and early 30s the public's attitude towards radiation has shifted 180° and it is now considered an extremely dangerous and harmful material. However, even as late as the 1950s, there were still some items produced containing radioactivity which today would be unthinkable. The "Buck Rogers Mystery Ring" of the 1950s was activated with polonium. With the shift in public attitudes towards radioactivity, and increasing problems in disposal of radioactive materials, the disposal of radium presents a particularly perplexing problem. The radium which was produced in the early part of the century is still around in various forms and is extremely difficult to dispose of. All objects discovered claiming to contain radium should be taken seriously and should be properly surveyed. They then should either be stored in some area where the environment is protected from the radioactivity or if a very small amount of radium is present, they may be disposed of through one of several commercial sources. Any significant amount of radium is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to dispose of and there are only limited sites which will accept these materials. No clear cut, uniform mechanism for the handling of radioactive materials which turn up outside of the usual institutional sources, is currently in place.

137Cs budget during the period of 1960s in a small drainage basin on the Loess Plateau of China.

A sediment profile with a thickness of 28.12 m in a failed reservoir in a small catchment of the Yuntaishan Gully in the Loess Plateau of China consisted of 44 flood couplets deposited during the period from 1960 to 1970 with total volume of 2.36 x 10(6)m(3). Specific sediment yields for a flood event varied from 300 t km(-2) to 14,400 t km(-2) and annual sediment yields varied from 2500 t km(-2) in 1966 to 40,000 t km(-2) in 1964 with a mean value of 12,700 t km(-2)a(-1) for the period. Average annual (137)Cs concentrations of the sediments increased from 0.92 Bq kg(-1) in 1960 to 4.82 Bq kg(-1) in 1963, then decreased to 1.53 Bq kg(-1) in 1970. The total (137)Cs activity in the reservoir sediments was 9.22 x 10(9) Bq, which accounted for 31.9% of the total (137)Cs fallout precipitation of 2.89 x 10(10) Bq within the catchment during the period. The proportion of the (137)Cs loss from the catchment to the (137)Cs fallout precipitation within the catchment in a year varied between 8.01% and 66.8%, and it was 20.9% for the peak (137)Cs deposition year of 1963 and 52.0% in 1964. By analysis of the (137)Cs budget in the catchment for the (137)Cs peak precipitation period from 1962 to 1964, the (137)Cs surface enrichment coefficient Gamma should be much less than 0.23. And for calculation of soil losses on the cultivated land in the inter-gully area by using the Mass Balance Model II, the value of Gamma should be 0.05-0.1.

Spread of 60Co contaminated steel and its legal consequences in Taiwan.

Since 1992, over 200 civilian residential and school buildings in Taiwan have been identified to have contained 60Co contaminated steel rebar emitting excessive gamma-radioactivity in living environments. These buildings were mostly constructed in early 1983 and 1984 by employing steels from one steel mill, which had recycled unknown 60Co orphan sources in northern Taiwan. In 1994, a group of residents who once stayed for a protracted period up to 10 y in the contaminated Ming-Sheng Villa filed a civil action against Taiwan's nuclear regulatory office, the Atomic Energy Council, for state tort compensation of 3.4 M U.S. dollars in equivalent. After three years of court processes, the Taipei District Court handed down a decision in partial favor of the exposed residents. Both parties soon appealed against this judgment to the Taiwan Appellate Court. This article analyzes the main legal issues involved, including government's obligations to prevent and eliminate contamination, to take preventive measures, and to take necessary remedial measures; and plaintiffs' assertion on any legal right against governmental offices. Moreover, discussion issues contain the scope of damage and compensation, causation analysis, absence of effective and efficient regulation over radioactive contamination, limit of tort compensation law and compensation amount, weight of medical evidence as well as role of expert witnesses, and related comparative legal studies.

Regulation of nuclear radiation exposures in India.

India has a long-term program of wide spread applications of nuclear radiations and radioactive sources for peaceful applications in medicine, industry, agriculture and research and is already having several thousand places in the country where such sources are being routinely used. These places are mostly outside the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) installations. DAE supplies such sources. The most important application of nuclear energy in DAE is in electricity generation through nuclear power plants. Fourteen such plants are operating and many new plants are at various stages of construction. In view of the above mentioned wide spread applications, Indian parliament through an Act, called Atomic Energy Act, 1964 created an autonomous body called Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) with comprehensive authority and powers. This Board issues codes, guides, manuals, etc., to regulate such installations so as to ensure safe use of such sources and personnel engaged in such installations and environment receives radiation exposures within the upper bounds prescribed by them. Periodic reports are submitted to AERB to demonstrate compliance of its directives. Health, Safety and Environment Group of Bhabha Atomic Research Centres, Mumbai carries out necessary surveillance and monitoring of all installations of the DAE on a routine basis and also periodic inspections of other installations using radiation sources. Some of the nuclear fuel cycle plants like nuclear power plants and fuel reprocessing involve large radioactive source inventories and have potential of accidental release of radioactivity into the environment, an Environmental Surveillance Laboratory (ESL) is set up at each such site much before the facility goes into operation. These ESL's collect baseline data and monitor the environment throughout the life of the facilities including the decommissioning stage. The data is provided to AERB and is available to members of the public. In addition, a multi-tier system of AERB permissions is in place to ensure that all aspects of safety have been considered before permission to operate is granted. The stages where permission of AERB is essential are site selection, design data, and several stages during construction and operation. The details required by AERB include provision for treatment and storage of radioactive waste, de-commissioning procedures and provision of costs. In addition to AERB, nuclear power plants have to comply with the requirements of Ministry of Environment and Forests and get their clearance. This is given on the basis of Environmental Impact Assessment Report which should satisfy the authorities that no ecological damage will be caused and the facility will not have adverse effect on the environment. In addition, the State Pollution Control Board where the facility is to be located has to permit the site of the plant for its proposed discharges into the environment. It is largely due to the above comprehensive regulatory controls that none of the plants in India had any accident during the last 34 decades of operation. The type of measurements carried out by the ESL's and results from a few typical ESL's will be presented.

Continuous radioactivity monitoring systems. From the pre-history of radioprotection to the future of radioecology.

The first significant quantities of artificial radioactivity appeared in the environment around the end of the 1940s. They were gigantic and their metrology very quickly seemed to be essential for sanitary and military reasons. In the 1950s, the first continuous monitoring systems of "fall out" were created. They were neither automatic nor sensitive and radioprotection of the environment was not a concern only for simple public information. Since then, radioecology, technology and evolution of our mentality have completely modified our way of thinking. Thus, from the 1980s up to the dawn of the new millennium, the gap between the performances of metrology laboratories and certain aspects of direct measurement has almost disappeared. 1986 certainly contributed a lot to the concept of surveillance networks and alarm systems, emphasising that the major advantage of these is the fact that they are operational, the minute before the accident.

The radium century.

Last year, the UK Government agreed that a potentially dangerous legacy of radiation-contaminated land should be dealt with, after decades of ignorance and inaction on the part of the authorities. The cost of this could run to many hundreds of millions of pounds, assuming that the hundreds of sites potentially involved, which date from the birth of the nuclear industry, can actually be identified. This very practical problem cannot be tackled without an understanding of the lost history of the production and use of radium--a history that is now precisely a century in duration.

The lab and the land: overcoming the Arctic in Cold War Alaska.

The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans--experiments publicized by post-Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere.

From the lost radium files: misadventures in the absence of training, regulation, and accountability.

PURPOSE: Radium was the foundation of brachytherapy in the early decades of the 20th century. Despite being a most precious and perilous substance, it was mislaid with surprising frequency. This essay explores how it was lost, the efforts taken to recover it, and measures instituted to prevent mishandling. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Review of contemporary literature, government publications, archives, and lay press. RESULTS: Radium is a particularly dangerous substance because of its long half-life, its gaseous daughter (radon), and the high-energy emissions of its decay products. Despite the hazard, it was unregulated for most of the century. Any physician could obtain and administer it, and protocols for safe handling were generally lacking. Change came with appreciation of the danger, regulation, mandated training, and the institution of a culture of accountability. Unfortunately, careless management of medical radionuclides remains a global hazard. CONCLUSION: Responsible stewardship of radioactive material was not a high priority, for practitioners or the federal government, for much of the 20th century. As a result, large quantities of radium had gone astray, possibly subjecting the general public to continued radiation exposure. Lessons from the radium era remain relevant, as medical radionuclides are still mishandled.

A review of irradiated fuel particle releases from the Windscale Piles, 1950-1957.

Radiological assessments have assumed that the mass of irradiated uranium oxide particles inadvertently released to the atmosphere from the Windscale Piles, two nuclear reactors at Windscale Works, Sellafield, England, during the 1950s was 20 kg. This paper re-examines the assumptions upon which this figure was based and concludes that the value is a realistically conservative estimate of the release, consistent with current radiological protection practice. The mass estimate is derived from a reanalysis of plant data produced at the time. The environmental data on which the initial estimates were based are reconfirmed, and additional support is provided by an interpretation of modelling studies of both the total deposition and milk concentrations resulting from that deposition. Milk-monitoring data from the time are shown to be consistent with the release assumptions used in the dispersion modelling exercise. Finally, the issue of statistical undersampling is addressed using the particle numbers and size distributions produced by the modelling exercise.

Estimate of European 129I releases supported by 129I analysis in an Alpine ice core.

129I in the European environment originates predominantly from the industrial nuclear fuel reprocessing plants Sellafield (Great Britain), Marcoule, and La Hague (both France). While reliable data on 129I releases from La Hague exist for the whole period of operation, less is known about the contributions from Sellafield and Marcoule. For those periods where no data are available, i.e., for the first 16 years of the Sellafield operation and for the first 3 decades of the Marcoule operation, we estimated releases into the atmosphere of 118 GBq and 825 GBq, respectively. Hence, Marcoule was the major European source of airborne 129I, contributing about 45% to the total airborne 129I releases from all the European reprocessing facilities, until it was decommissioned in 1997. The estimated total emissions were compared with 129I deposition fluxes for the time period 1970-2002, obtained from the analysis of an ice core from Fiescherhorn glacier, Swiss Alps (46 degrees 33'N, 08 degrees 04'E; 3900 m asl). The temporal evolution of the 129I deposition agrees well with the total 129I releases into the atmosphere from the European reprocessing facilities and from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, supporting our estimated release rates. However,the 129I concentrations and deposition fluxes at Fiescherhorn glacier were a factor of 6 lower than values obtained from the analysis of rainwater collected near Zurich (408 m asl) in Switzerland in the years 1994-97. This suggests a strong vertical concentration gradient of 129I, typical for water-soluble atmospheric trace species which are removed from the atmosphere in the course of days by precipitation scavenging, and must be taken into account if glaciers are used as an archive for a retrospective quantification of 129I deposition fluxes. In addition, the temporal evolution of the contribution of 129I re-emitted from the ocean's surface for the 129I inventory in the atmosphere was quantified for the first time. Although the annual amount of 129I released this way was very low until the early 1990s, it is similar to the airborne 129I releases from Sellafield and La Hague in the present time.

Environmental surveillance at Los Alamos: an independent reassessment of historical data.

Since 1971, a series of annual Environmental Surveillance ... reports have served as the official public record of Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) environmental performance. In northern New Mexico, where past LANL emissions are a public health concern, there is public skepticism over the accuracy of information contained in these reports. To test the hypothesis that LANL Environmental Surveillance ... reports systematically understate past emissions, we compared the data on releases in LANL's own internal Occurrence Reports Collection (ORC) to the data reported to the public in the Environmental Surveillance ... reports. A data set of 89 environmental occurrences recorded in the ORC in the time period from 1971 through 1980 was assembled. We did not find a systematic pattern of quantitative underreporting of source terms. However, 17 of the 89 (19%) environmental occurrences recorded in the ORC were not reported to the public in the Environmental Surveillance ... reports. The observed discrepancies are discussed in terms of their relevance to public health concerns. Methodological caveats dictate restraint in applying these findings beyond the scope of the relative comparison performed here. Possible social origins for the rejected hypothesis are discussed. Areas for further consideration by the Centers for Disease Control's dose reconstruction study of LANL are identified.

The creation of an historical meteorological database for environmental dose assessment.

The focus of this study is to develop wind data for the Savannah River Site (SRS) between 1955 and 1961 to be used in an assessment of estimates of atmospheric dispersion and downwind risk at the Savannah River Site. In particular, a study of the uncertainties of radioiodine dosimetry from the late 1950s provides the underlying motivation for developing historical windroses at the Savannah River Site (SRS). Wind measurement towers did not exist at the SRS until the early 1970s. Three relatively simple methods were used to create a 1955-1961 meteorological database for the SRS for a dose reconstruction project. The winds were estimated from onsite measurements in the 1990s and National Weather Service (NWS) observations in the 1990s and 1950s using (1) a linear regression method, (2) a similarity theory approach, and (3) a simple statistical differences method. The criteria for determining success were based on (1) how well the mean values and standard deviations of the predicted wind speed agree with the known SRS values from the 1990s, (2) the shape of the predicted frequency distribution functions for wind speed, and (3) how closely the predicted windroses resembled the SRS windrose for the 1990s. The linear regression model's wind speed distribution function was broad, flat, and skewed too much toward higher wind speeds. The similarity theory approach produced a wind speed distribution function that contained excess predicted speeds in the range 0-1.54 m s(-1) (0-3 kts) and had 'excluded' bins caused by predictions being made from integer values of knots in the NWS data. The distribution function from the mean difference method was smooth with a shape like a Weibull distribution with a shape parameter of 2 and appeared to resemble closely the SRS 1992-1996 distribution. The wind directions for all three methods of approach were successfully based on the mean difference method. It was difficult to discern differences among the wind roses produced by the three methods so the wind speed distribution functions need to be examined in order to make an informed choice for dose reconstruction.