Terminological and methodological discrepancies concerning the radionuclides' effective, environmental and biological half-lives

TL;DR

This paper analyzes discrepancies in terminology and methodology for determining radionuclides' half-lives, highlighting conflicting concepts and proposing conditions for comparability in risk assessments.

Contribution

It provides a thorough analysis of the theoretical assumptions, conditions, and inconsistencies of different half-life concepts and suggests a unified approach for their empirical determination and comparison.

Findings

Identifies two main contradictory concepts of half-lives.

Analyzes strengths and weaknesses of each concept.

Proposes conditions for comparing different half-life estimates.

Abstract

At the basis of most risk assessments aimed at determining the long-term trends in changes in the activity of radionuclides in the environment and thus exposure to ionizing radiation, various concepts of half-lives are used, particularly: biological, environmental (ecological) and effective one. There is a clear lack of consensus on the terminological level and, more importantly, on the methodological level regarding the determination of these half-lives. This manifests by a divergent methodology and the existence of two main, but contradictory concepts. In the first, empirically determined half-life is referred to as environmental or biological. The effective half-life is extrapolated at a later stage after taking into account the physical decay. In the second concept, the effective half-life is the one empirically determined and the remaining half-lives can be extrapolated after correction for physical decay. As both concepts seems to be incompatible with each other, the aim of this work was to thoroughly analyze their theoretical assumptions, conditions, strengths and weaknesses and to define the conditions that must be met in order to enable comparison of the results obtained with the use of two separate concepts. In case of the environmental components the suggested approach is to empirically determine the effective half-life, and subsequently, to extrapolate the environmental and/or biological half-lives.