The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project

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ISBN 13 :
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Download or read book Phase 1 of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 40 years, the US government made plutonium for nuclear weapons at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. Radioactive materials were released to both the air and water from Hanford. People could have been exposed to these materials, called radionuclides. The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction (HEDR) Project is a multi-year scientific study to estimate the radiation doses the public may have received as a results of these releases. The study began in 1988. During the first phase, scientists began to develop and test methods for reconstructing the radiation doses. To do this, scientists found or reconstructed information about the amount and type of radionuclides that were released from Hadford facilities, where they traveled in environment, and how they reached people. Information about the people who could have been exposed was also found or reconstructed. Scientists then developed a computer model that can estimate doses from radiation exposure received many years ago. All the information that had been gathered was fed into the computer model. Then scientists did a test run'' to see whether the model was working properly. As part of its test run, '' scientists asked the computer model to generate two types of preliminary results: amounts of radionuclides in the environment (air, soil, pasture grass, food, and milk) and preliminary doses people could have received from all the routes of radiation exposure, called exposure pathways. Preliminary dose estimates were made for categories of people who shared certain characteristics and for the Phase 1 population as a whole. 26 refs., 48 figs.