Pathways to man

The study of radionuclide pathways leading to man generally has the goal of allowing us to predict human exposure from measurements of the radionuclide concentration in some segment of the environment. This modelling process provides a valuable tool in both the regulatory and health protection fields. However, most of the models in the regulatory field and in the health physics profession were designed to maximize exposure estimates. It is preferable to have scientifically defensible estimates and to add suitable safety factors at the end. Thus we are still faced with the development and validation of suitable models for many of the radionuclides of interest. The most useful models will include means of assessing variability and uncertainty. In this case variability might be considered as the differences in behavior due to age, sex or other factors in animals or man and those differences among plant species or animal species that determine their uptake factors. The uncertainty, on the other hand, would be the estimate of possible error in the experimental measurements. Model parameters would always have some variability even for site-specific cases and broad averages for population groups would have to include a factor expressing the possible variabilty and uncertainity. Thus any exposure calculation would have to be expressed with some range and valid assessments of this range are required