When IAEA was established as an autonomous member of the United Nations family in 1957, a prominent assignment was to "seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world". The inclusion of "health" reflected an important fact — that medical uses of radiation and radionuclides were among the first and most widespread applications...

Background: The presence of radionuclides in the soil, measures need to be taken to minimize the radiation dose to humans. It is mostly gamma-emitting radionuclides that contribute to the radiation dose in long term behavior of these radionuclides in soil may determine the extent to which such countermeasures need to be applied. Materials and Methods: The activity concentration of these radionu...

Historical operations at the Hanford Site (Washington State, USA) have released a wide array of non-radionuclide and radionuclide contaminants into the environment. As a result of stakeholder concerns, Native American exposure scenarios have been integrated into Hanford risk assessments. Because its contribution to radiological risk to Native Americans is culturally and geographically specific ...

Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of exposure to the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. Variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the Chernobyl accident is considered as a random exogenous shock with which to try to establish its causal impact on poor health, labour force p...

Radionuclide injury to the lung has been studied in rats, hamsters, dogs, mice and baboons. Exposure of the lung to high dose levels of radionuclides produces a spectrum of progressively more severe functional and morphological changes, ranging from radiation pneumonitis and fibrosis to lung tumors. These changes are somewhat similar for different species. Their severity can be related to the a...

Radionuclides released into the environment enter the food chain through plants and fish among others, and pose a potential risk to human health. Eliminating radionuclides from the soil environment or reducing their uptake by food crops would decrease the dose for humans. The possibility of phytoremediation was suggested to reduce the amount of radionuclides in the soil. The transfer rate of ra...

Background: One of the main sources of exposure to radiation is terrestrial radionuclides in the environment. These radioisotopes are present in the Earthchr('39')s crust and can be increased by human activity such as mining of coal, oil, and minerals. Materials and Methods: In this study, 39 soil samples including virgin and cultivated were collected from around of the Shazand Refinery Complex...

The feasibility of disrupting a tumor's vascular structure with various radiation types and radionuclides is investigated. Calculated absorbed dose profiles for photons and (4)He ions suggest that low-energy beta-gamma and alpha emitting radionuclides can deposit sufficient absorbed dose to disrupt a tumor's vascular structure while minimizing the dose outside the blood vessel. Candidate radion...

This article explains why technologists handling positron-emitting radionuclides may have higher measured radiation exposures than technologists working with single-photon emitting radionuclides. We will summarize measurements we have made, as well as those reported by other authors. In addition, we will describe the procedures implemented to minimize exposure.