SECTION 4
TECHNICAL APPROACH — INTERNAL DOSE
The technical approach used to estimate the organ-specific radiation dose
commitments for the American military personnel exposed on Rongerik Atoll is based
on the following data:
Radionuclide
inventory
data
for
Shot
Bravo
calculated
by
Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.
Urinalysis
data
for
the
exposed
Americans obtained
by
Los Alamos
The basic approach used to calculate the dose commitments has four steps.
>
National Laboratory.
The calculated radionuclide inventory provides the time-dependentrelative
activity of the radionuclides present in the fallout.
The inventory is normalized to the actual activity intake by relying on
post-shot urinalysis to determine the amount of I-131 activity intake.
The internal dose pathways are examined to determine that doses are highsided through use of large-particle inhalation dose conversion factors
(rem/yCi), which are developed by modifying published ingestion dose
conversion factors.
Organ-specific dose commitments (rem) are calculated by combining the
normalized activity inventory data with the large particle inhalation dose
conversion factors.
A description of each of the above steps is provided in the subsections below.
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