An major environmental concern for people that hunt and eat game animals killed in the vicinity of U.S. National Laboratories is that the meat from these animals will be contaminated with radioactivity. Wild animals often inhabit and graze on grounds of the facilities and then migrate off the grounds, where they harvested by recreational hunters. Consumption of this contaminated game, therefore, is a potential radiological health threat to hunters and their families. The situation with cesium in deer near the Savannah River site in Georgia is described in this article:
Radiocesium in White-tailed Deer on the Savannah River Site
The Savannah River National Laboratory has recently produced a portable radioactivity detection system to measure cesium in wildlife, as described in this article:
Improved field-portable system to measure Cs-137 in wildlife. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 223-224 (2020) 106394.
Read both of the above articles, and then answer the following questions.
Q1: How is the amount of cesium radioactivity in soil related to the soil’s natural potassium content, and how is this explained in terms of the chemistries of cesium and potassium?
Q2: If a hunter brings in a harvested deer with an live weight (i.e., the weight prior to be gutted) of 300 pounds, how much edible meat would that animal be expected to yield? How would this compare to the amount of edible meat from a pig of the same weight?
Q3: If the total measured concentration of cesium-137 in the hunter’s deer meat was determined to be 22.59 pCi/g, what would be the cesium activity concentration received from Department Of Energy (ADOE) radioactivity sources (i.e., the Savanah River Site)?
Q4: What would be the annual effective dose equivalent (in mSv) that the hunter would receive from eating all of this deer’s meat over the course of a year (the DoseDOE)?
Q5: Suppose the hunter was not an adult, but rather a 12-year-old boy. What would be the annual effective dose equivalent that the boy would receive from eating his deer?
[Note: You need no other information than what you’ve read in the two articles above, to answer these questions.]
please try answering the questions from your own words and dont just copy from the articles even citation doesnt work. my professor want you to paraphrase not just copy from the article.
