Hot particles in the environment: assessment of dose and health detriment

Hot particles, highly radioactive particles made up of fission products or actinides and being small enough to become airborne, defy many of the dose models and risk concepts in use by the health physics community. At environmental exposures, both on the level of populations and tissues, dose distributions become very skewed; only few persons or tissue cells being exposed at correspondingly higher levels. Fallout from Chernobyl showed a numerically small subfraction of the aerosol particles containing activities of up to 10 kBq 103-ruthenium or up to 0.3 Bq 242-curium in single particles. The implications of these hot particles on the dosimetry after uptake are great since the locally accumulated dose, for example in the pulmonary region, may reach up to 10 MSv. For inhalation as well as for ingestion, theoretical considerations predict a decrease in the effectiveness of particulate radioactivity as compared to monomeric activity. This hypothesis is also supported by experimental and epidemiological evidence from the examination of the radiation effects of particulate alpha-emitters deposited in the lung.