Uncertainty and variability in historical time-weighted average exposure data

Health Physics
Adam J Davis, D J Strom

Abstract

Beginning around 1940, private companies began processing of uranium and thorium ore, compounds, and metals for the Manhattan Engineer District and later the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Personnel from the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory (HASL) visited many of the plants to assess worker exposures to radiation and radioactive materials. They developed a time-and-task approach to estimating "daily weighted average" (DWA) concentrations of airborne uranium, thorium, radon, and radon decay products. While short-term exposures greater than 10(5) dpm m(-3) of uranium and greater than 10(5) pCi L(-1) of radon were observed, DWA concentrations were much lower. The HASL-reported DWA values may be used as inputs for dose reconstruction in support of compensation decisions, but they have no numerical uncertainties associated with them. In this work, Monte Carlo methods are used retrospectively to assess the uncertainty and variability in the DWA values for 63 job titles from five different facilities that processed U, U ore, Th, or 226Ra-222Rn between 1948 and 1955. Most groups of repeated air samples are well described by lognormal distributions. Combining samples associated with different tasks often results in a reduction o...Continue Reading

References

Aug 14, 2002·AIHA Journal : a Journal for the Science of Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety·Mark Nicas, Michael Jayjock

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Citations

Jun 23, 2011·Radiation Protection Dosimetry·Daniel J StromPeter A Zharov

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