Radiation doses from residual radioactivity

In this chapter available data and calculations for assessing the exposure of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and persons who entered the cities after the bombings have been presented. It appears that it is possible to produce firm estimates only for external radiation and, while the internal contribution for long-lived fission products appears small, there is no way to evaluate potential exposures to the short-lived fission products. The radiation exposure in the most highly contaminated fallout area of a few hectares at Nishiyama, Nagasaki, is estimated as 20 to 40 R when integrated from one hour to infinity using a decay exponent of -1.2. For the Hiroshima Koi-Takasu area, the corresponding exposure is estimated as 1 to 3 R. The falloff with distance for Nagasaki is not steep and an exposure of one-fifth of the maximum is spread over an area of perhaps 1000 ha. With the assumption stated above, the potential maximum exposures to external radiation from induced radioactivity at the hypocenter is estimated to be about 80 R fir Hiroshima and 30 to 40 R for Nagasaki with the assumptions stated above. These exposures fall off with both time and distance. The cumulative exposure would be about one-third as large after a day and only a few percent after a week. The falloff with distance is less striking, but can be estimated from the areas listed or from the curves shown in Gritzner and Woolson. Unlike the fallout, which exposed individuals in their living areas, exposures to induced activity came from reentry of individuals into the area around the hypocenter. As an example, an individual entering the Hiroshima hypocenter area after one day and working 10 or 20 hours a day for a week would have been exposed to about 10 R. If the person had been working at a distance of 500 m, the exposure would have been about 1 R and, at 1000 m, about 20 mR. The exposure described apply to the specified areas in the two cities. Application of these values to individuals requires knowing the location of the person to within about 200 m from the time of the explosion to a few weeks afterwards. This is an effort that might be comparable to the present shielding study for survivors. The sizes of the four exposed groups are relatively small; however, the number has been estimated only for those exposed to fallout in the Nishiyama district of Nagasaki. Okajima listed the population of Nishiyama as about 600 at the time of the bomb. No figures are available for the other three groups. The individual exposures from residual radiation may not be significant compared with the direct radiation at the time of the bomb. On the other hand, individuals with potential exposure from these sources are dubious candidates for inclusion in a cohort that was presumably not exposed. For comparison with organ doses estimated in other parts of this program, the exposure estimates are converted to absorbed dose in tissue. The first conversion of exposure to absorbed dose in air uses the factor rad in air 0.87 x exposure in R. UNSCEAR uses an average combined factor of 0.7 to convert absorbed dose in air to absorbed dose in tissue for the whole body. This factor accounts for the change in material (air to tissue) and for backscatter and the shielding afforded by other tissues of the body. No allowance for shielding by buildings has been included here. The cumulative fallout exposures given above become absorbed doses in tissue of 12 to 24 rad for Nagasaki and 0.6 to 2 rad for Hiroshima. The cumulative exposures from induced radioactivity become absorbed doses in tissue of 18 to 24 rad for Nagasaki and about 50 rad for Hiroshima. (author)