Abstract
Long-lived radon decay products implanted by alpha recoils into indoor surfaces can be used to reveal past radon concentration levels. Owing to its availability, physical and electrical properties, etc. sheets of glass are the best suited substrate for the implanted activity. Due to the long half-life (22 y) of 210Pb the implanted activity reflects radon levels several decades back in time. In this contribution results from measurements of implanted 210Po in glass sheets sampled from different dwellings are presented. The 210Po activity is determined non-destructively by alpha spectrometry with a specially developed windowless pulse ionisation chamber. The measured 210Po activities correlates fairly well (r2=0.55) with the radon exposure as estimated from contemporary track etch results, considering the great uncertainty of the extrapolation procedure. The results obtained indicate that practical exploitation of the 210Po activity of glass surfaces as an estimator of lung cancer risk is feasible, but the method must be utilised with care in order to minimise the influence from non-dose related factors.
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