Abstract
Building materials can contribute to ionizing radiation hazards due to their variable content in radioactive isotopes. Uranium, thorium, and potassium radioisotopes are present in various building materials due to their presence in raw materials: minerals and rocks. Among natural building materials, granite is one of those deserving more attention in terms of radioactive hazards. Granites are commonly used in historical buildings of NW Portugal and NW Spain, due to the geological characteristics of these areas. However, radioactive isotopes are present in variable proportions in granites, and thus, in relation to other potential building materials, granites might present a higher radiological hazard. This work discusses multivariate analysis results obtained by spectrometry of a portable range in indoor spaces, presenting different proportions of granite used as a building material in order to evaluate a typology proposed for assessing gamma radiation hazards.
Highlights
Radiological risks include external gamma radiation from various sources including building materials, for example, geological materials
In this work, based on portable gamma spectrometry data, we aimed to evaluate the use of multivariate analysis for assessing proposals of ordinal categories of building spaces in terms of the contribution of building materials to external gamma radiation dose
The results obtained suggest that group analysis can be an important tool in the definition of building typologies for mapping the hazard related to external gamma radiation
Summary
Radiological risks include external gamma radiation from various sources including building materials, for example, geological materials. The main sources of gamma radiation in building materials are the 40 K isotope (potassium) and isotopes of the uranium and thorium decay series that are present in some minerals. The main effects of ionizing radiation on living organisms are cell death, loss of reproductive capacity, or mutation [2,3,4,5]. Such effects depend on several factors, with the dose rate and the linear energy transfer (LET) of the radiation being the most important.
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