Relevance of Radiocaesium Interception Potential (RIP) on a worldwide scale to assess soil vulnerability to 137 Cs contamination

Louis Vandebroek, May Van Hees, Bruno Delvaux, Otto Spaargaren, Yves Thiry, Lieve Sweeck

    Research outputpeer-review

    Abstract

    The extent of radiocaesium retention in soil is important to quantify the risk of further foodchain contamination. The Radiocaesium Interception Potential (RIP) is an intrinsic soil parameter which can be used to categorize soils or minerals in terms of their capacity to selectively adsorb radiocaesium. In this study, we measured RIP for a large soil collection representative of major FAO soil reference groups and tested the possibility to predict the RIP on the basis of other easily measurable soil data. We compared RIP values with those obtained from separate chemical extraction experiments.Measured RIP values (1.8e13300 mmol kg1) were shown to include nearly all possible cases of agricultural soil contamination. Only Podzols, Andosols and Ferralsols were clearly characterized by a very low RIP (
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)87-93
    JournalJournal of environmental radioactivity
    Volume104
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Feb 2012

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