Prediction of Long-Term Health Risk from Radiocesium Deposited on Ground with Consideration of Land-Surface Properties

Abstract

After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, there have been long controversial discussions on “how safe is safe?” between the authorities and the residents in the affected area. This controversy was partly attributable to the way the authorities made a judgement based on the annual effective dose rate; meanwhile, many of the local residents have serious concerns about future consequences for their health caused by chronic radiation exposure, particularly of small children. To settle this controversy, the author presents an approach based on long-term cancer risk projections of female infants, i.e., the most radiosensitive group, following land contamination by radiocesium deposition into ground with different surface conditions; the land was classified into three categories on the basis of decaying patterns of radiation dose rate: “Fast”, “Middle”, and “Slow”. From the results of analyses with an initial dose rate of 20 mGy per year, it was predicted that the integrated lifetime attributable risk (LAR) of cancer mortality of a female person ranged by a factor of 2 from 1.8% (for the Fast area) to 3.6% (for the Slow area) that were clearly higher than the nominal risk values derived from effective dose estimates with median values of environmental model parameters. These findings suggest that accurate site-specific information on the behavioral characteristics of radionuclides in the terrestrial environment are critically important for adequate decision making for protecting people when there is an event accompanied by large-scale radioactive contamination.