Study of Local Radon Occurrence as an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Project

Abstract

A study of local radon occurrence involving more than a dozen students representing five academic departments and three faculty from the Geology, Physics, and Biology Departments of Southern Oregon State College was recently carried out in the Rogue River Valley of southern Oregon. Four hundred homes in three communities were sampled for in-home radon, and soil-gas radon and gamma-ray measurements were taken at each homesite. Students were involved in designing the project, fabrication of hardware, writing computer programs to handle the data collected, conducting home interviews, collecting data in the field, and analyzing the results. The fall term of 1988 was spent preparing for the data-collection phase of the study which extended from November, 1988, through March, 1989. Two of the communities studied showed uniformly low in-home radon levels, the third features a region with some homes above the EPA action level of four picocuries of radon per liter of air. The project provided an unusual opportunit...