Individual and Social Risk Due to Natural and Artificial Environmental Radioactivity in Greece

Abstract

The public reaction during an emergency situation following a nuclear accident is determined by personal rather than collective safety concern. It seems useful, therefore, to provide information on the uncontrolled variations of the individual risk related to natural radioactivity, as long as these variations define a sort of ‘risk threshold’, below which the application of individual countermeasures is questionable. Two sets of cases of natural versus artificial radioactivity risk assessment for the Greek population are presented in this paper. In the first set the variations of the individual risk due to the external exposure to the terrestrial gamma rays of natural origin and those of the 137Cs deposited after the Chernobyl accident are compared. In the second set the risk due to the internal exposure of the patients of the major Greek radon spas is compared with the risk of the Athens region inhabitants resulting from a characteristic accident of the Greek Research Reactor.