The possible importance of short-term exposure to resuspended radionuclides

The role played by the resuspension of deposited radionuclides, within about two years of deposition, in contributing to an exposure hazard is assessed. Such an assessment is necessarily uncertain because of the sparsity and variability of data on which a description of resuspension is based. In the particular application of assessing the consequences of hypothetical reactor accidents, it is shown that pessimistic assumptions about the short-term resuspension can easily lead to the inhalation-via-resuspension exposure pathway during the first few weeks being at least as important as the inhalation directly from the cloud from which deposition took place, unless land-use restrictions are imposed. (author)