Korean-specific dose coefficients for external environmental exposures: Soil contamination

Abstract

In this study, we first produced the Korean-specific dose coefficients (DCs) for soil contamination using the Mesh-type Reference Korean Phantoms (MRKPs). The Korean DCs were compared with the values in ICRP Publication 144 produced using the Caucasian-based ICRP reference phantoms to investigate dosimetric impact due to the racial difference (Korean/Asian vs Caucasian). Monte Carlo dose calculations using the Geant4 code were conducted where the photon and electron sources in the phase-space data used for the ICRP-144 DC calculations were irradiated to the MRKPs. For photons, the organ DCs of the MRKPs showed a good agreement with the ICRP-144 DCs (deviations <20 %) for most energies, while significant differences at energies below 0.05 MeV were observed by up to a factor of 55.6 (thymus at 0.015 MeV). For electrons, notable differences in the organ DCs were observed the overall energy region (deviations >20 % for most cases). The effective DCs of the MRKPs showed an excellent agreement with the ICRP-144 DCs for photons (deviations <16 %), whereas notable differences by up to 1.7 times (0.05 MeV) were observed for electrons. The Korean DCs for soil contamination will be beneficially used in dose estimates for Koreans especially in risk assessments.