Should you measure the radon concentration in your home?

Radon, a naturally occurring radioactive element, was discovered in the year 1900, and high lung cancer rates among miners were recognized hundreds of years before that, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers accepted that exposure to radon decay products was one of the major causes of the very high lung cancer rate among miners. Risks to the general population weren’t recognized until the early 1980s, when it was discovered that even homes can have high concentrations of radon—indeed, the airborne radioactivity in some (very rare) homes is higher than is allowed in uranium mines! Once a risk from radon was recognized, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other organizations including the Department of Energy, launched research efforts to help assess risks and remediation options: what is the statistical and spatial distribution of indoor radon, what methods can be used to reduce radon concentrations in homes, what is the risk as a function of exposure, and so on. In this chapter, we summarize some of the data on radon distributions and some of the risk estimates, and then discuss how the available information can be used in a decision analysis to make recommendations on who should perform radon measuremnents or remediation. This chapter focuses on the decision analysis itself (originally discussed in Lin et al., 1999), and not on the statistical model, based on Bayesian hierarchical regression, that fed into the decision analysis. For more information about hierarchical regression, see Gelman et al. (2003, section 22.4).