R. W. Leggett

A respiratory model for uranium aluminide based on occupational data.

As part of an epidemiological study, doses from intake of radionuclides were estimated for workers employed during a 52-year period at the Rocketdyne/Atomics International facility in California. The facility was involved in a variety of research programmes, including nuclear fuel fabrication, spent nuclear fuel decladding, and reactor operation and disassembly. Most of the documented intakes involved inhalation of enriched uranium (U), fission products, or plutonium (Pu). Highest doses were estimated for a group of workers exposed to airborne uranium aluminide (UAl(x)) during the fabrication of reactor fuel plates. Much of the exposure to UAl(x) occurred early in the fuel fabrication programme, before it was recognised that intake and lung retention were being underestimated from urinary data due to an unexpected delayed dissolution of the inhaled material. In workers who had been removed from exposure, the rate of urinary excretion of U increased for a few months, peaked, and then declined at a rate consistent with moderately soluble material. This pattern differs markedly from the monotonically decreasing absorption rates represented by the default absorption types in the Human Respiratory Tract Model (HRTM) of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). This paper summarises the findings on the behaviour of UAl(x) in these workers and describes material-specific parameter values of the HRTM based on this information.

Parameter uncertainty analysis of a biokinetic model of caesium.

Parameter uncertainties for the biokinetic model of caesium (Cs) developed by Leggett et al. were inventoried and evaluated. The methods of parameter uncertainty analysis were used to assess the uncertainties of model predictions with the assumptions of model parameter uncertainties and distributions. Furthermore, the importance of individual model parameters was assessed by means of sensitivity analysis. The calculated uncertainties of model predictions were compared with human data of Cs measured in blood and in the whole body. It was found that propagating the derived uncertainties in model parameter values reproduced the range of bioassay data observed in human subjects at different times after intake. The maximum ranges, expressed as uncertainty factors (UFs) (defined as a square root of ratio between 97.5th and 2.5th percentiles) of blood clearance, whole-body retention and urinary excretion of Cs predicted at earlier time after intake were, respectively: 1.5, 1.0 and 2.5 at the first day; 1.8, 1.1 and 2.4 at Day 10 and 1.8, 2.0 and 1.8 at Day 100; for the late times (1000 d) after intake, the UFs were increased to 43, 24 and 31, respectively. The model parameters of transfer rates between kidneys and blood, muscle and blood and the rate of transfer from kidneys to urinary bladder content are most influential to the blood clearance and to the whole-body retention of Cs. For the urinary excretion, the parameters of transfer rates from urinary bladder content to urine and from kidneys to urinary bladder content impact mostly. The implication and effect on the estimated equivalent and effective doses of the larger uncertainty of 43 in whole-body retention in the later time, say, after Day 500 will be explored in a successive work in the framework of EURADOS.

Biokinetic models for Group VB elements

This paper reviews biokinetic data for the Group VB elements vanadium, niobium, and tantalum, and presents biokinetic models describing their systemic behaviour. The model for systemic niobium in adults was developed earlier and described in Publication 134 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. The model for niobium is used as a starting point for the development of models for vanadium and tantalum. Published biokinetic data for vanadium, including comparisons with niobium, indicate that the initial distribution of vanadium is broadly similar to that of niobium but that vanadium is less firmly fixed in most tissues and is excreted more rapidly than niobium. Biokinetic data for tantalum are more limited but suggest that its systemic behaviour closely resembles that of niobium at early times after administration. The model for niobium is proposed for application to tantalum in view of the suggested biological similarities of tantalum and niobium, their generally strong coherence in nature due to similar ionic radii and identical valence states, and the difficulties in developing parameter values directly from available data for tantalum. The proposed model for vanadium relies largely on vanadium-specific information and varies considerably from the model for niobium.

Biokinetics of yttrium and comparison with its geochemical twin holmium

The transition metal yttrium (Y, atomic number 39) is chemically similar to elements in the lanthanide family (atomic numbers 57-71) and is found with the lanthanides in rare earth ores. Yttrium and the lanthanide holmium are referred to as geochemical twins because they generally show little fractionation from metamorphic or weathering processes, due to their closely similar chemical properties and nearly identical ionic radii. Extensive measurements on rocks, soils, and meteorites indicate that the Y/Ho mass concentration ratio rarely falls far from the so-called chondritic or solar system ratio of ∼26. This paper presents a new biokinetic model for yttrium in adult humans and examines whether yttrium and holmium may be biological as well as geochemical twins, considering model-based comparisons of their systemic behaviours in adult humans and model-free comparisons of their concentration ratios in human tissues and various types of vegetation. It appears that yttrium and holmium behave similarly in the human body and that their concentration ratios tend to cluster near the chondritic value in human tissues as well as plants, but the comparative information is too limited and imprecise to determine whether they are extremely close biological analogues.