It has been estimated that since the dawn of the nuclear era
more than “73 million cubic meters of soils and sediments in the
U.S. alone have been contaminated with actinides and fission
products by Department of Energy defense nuclear activities.”
However, with respect to the protection of human health, the
most relevant question is not how much radiation is in the
ground, but how much radiation will eventually reach people and
damage living cells. In order to answer this question it is
necessary as a first step to predict the transport of the
contaminants from where they leaked or were discharged through
the environment to areas where humans may be exposed to them.
The second step is to then try to predict how much of that
radiation people would be exposed to, and thus how big a dose
they would receive. In this report we will consider only the
first step in this process. There are a number of routes of
exposure and transport, such as (1) resuspension of deposited
radionuclides into the air, (2) uncovering o