Building protection- and building shielding-factors for environmental exposure to radionuclides and monoenergetic...

We describe a simplified method for calculating both building protection- and shielding-factors for generic one- and two-story housing-unit models that are source-term dependent. Typically, radionuclide-independent factors are applied generically to external dose coefficients to account for the radiation shielding effects of indoor residences. In reality, the shielding effectiveness of each housing-unit would change over time as the radionuclide mixture and gamma-ray energy spectrum change due to physical effects such as deposition, radioactive decay, weathering effects, and decontamination efforts. Thus, it is necessary to develop factors designed for multiple photon energy spectrums to generate a more realistic estimate of the shielding effectiveness of a particular building. It is impractical to develop factors specific to a spectrum of photons emitted by each radionuclide of interest. Therefore, Monte Carlo simulations have been performed for sixteen monoenergetic photon energies from 0.10 to 3.0 MeV to characterize the 3D radiation fluence through each housing-unit produced by two idealized, yet realistic, environmental exposure scenarios. Results of these simulations were then used to develop fitted logarithmic functions (extrapolated to 0.0 MeV) to correlate an estimated factor to any monoenergetic photon energy up to 3.0 MeV. To verify these functions, another series of Monte Carlo simulations were performed for a select set of radionuclides to develop radionuclide-specific building protection- and shielding-factors. Good agreement is achieved between factors estimated using the presented functions and those calculated directly using Monte Carlo methods. Factors predicted by these functions are found to be in general agreement with other study results reported on similar structures which applied various computational methods and source-terms. This study only focuses on generic one- and two-story homes to provide a practical application that can contribute to improve the preparedness for and the response to a nuclear or radiological emergency.