Estimating doses from Aboriginal bush foods post-remediation of a uranium mine

Abstract

This paper presents a calculator to facilitate assessments of ingestion doses from Aboriginal bush foods. The calculator combines information on traditional diet and land use with radionuclide concentration ratios and ingestion dose coefficients to estimate doses. The calculator was applied to the planned remediation of Ranger uranium mine to derive a set of scaling factors between radionuclide activity concentrations in environmental media and ingestion dose from bush foods. The scaling factors can be used to estimate doses from bush foods once the post-remediation radiological conditions of the mine and surrounding environment are known.

Keywords: Bush foods; Concentration ratio; Ingestion dose; Natural radionuclides; Site remediation; Tropical radioecology.