The objective of the study was to estimate the committed effective dose equivalent from internal tritium exposure and its uncertainty in case of tritium incident at Mayak PA. According to worker's self-report, he had been exposed as a result of pouring "heavy" water over himself while performing technological operation in September 2019. Two-component exponential model of tritiated water (HTO) excretion including fast and slow phases was used to describe HTO content in the body.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComparison of tritium volume activity (VA) rates in objects of environment in the Mayak Production Association (Mayak PA) affected area in the period from 2014 to 2015 with tritium VA rates in the same or similar objects of environment measured in the period from 2001 to 2013. Water samples from environmental objects-precipitations, ponds, wells-were the material for this research. Tritium VA in various environmental objects was measured using liquid scintillation method.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe workers at the Mayak nuclear facility near Ozyorsk, Russia are a primary source of information about exposure to radiation at low-dose rates, since they were subject to protracted exposures to external gamma rays and to internal exposures from plutonium inhalation. Here we re-examine lung cancer mortality rates and assess the effects of external gamma and internal plutonium exposures using recently developed Monte Carlo dosimetry systems. Using individual lagged mean annual lung doses computed from the dose realizations, we fit excess relative risk (ERR) models to the lung cancer mortality data for the Mayak Workers Cohort using risk-modeling software.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDifferences in results from the new Mayak Worker Dosimetry System (MWDS-2016) vs the previous MWDS-2013 are described. Statistical characteristics are shown for the distribution of accumulated absorbed doses to organs for 8340 workers with bioassay data. Differences in mean values of accumulated doses and their relative standard uncertainties calculated by MWDS-2016 and MWDS-2013 were analysed separately for various types of industrial compounds of plutonium, specifically nitrates, mixtures and oxides.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiat Prot Dosimetry
November 2017
The Mayak Worker Dosimetry System (MWDS-2013) is a system for interpreting measurement data from Mayak workers from both internal and external sources. This paper is concerned with the calculation of annual organ doses for Mayak workers exposed to plutonium aerosols, where the measurement data consists mainly of activity of plutonium in urine samples. The system utilises the latest biokinetic and dosimetric models, and unlike its predecessors, takes explicit account of uncertainties in both the measurement data and model parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiat Prot Dosimetry
November 2017
In order to check developed software tools, it was necessary to compare estimates of statistical characteristics of annual absorbed plutonium internal doses obtained by PANDORA and IMBA software with the same original data. The results were compared from dose calculations of five cases with different initial data on plutonium inhalation intake, lifetime measurements of plutonium activity in daily urine and post-mortem measurements in lungs, lung lymph nodes, liver and skeleton. Estimates of geometric mean and geometric standard deviation of annual regionally weighted lung dose and bone surface dose were compared.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn epidemiological studies, exposures of interest are often measured with uncertainties, which may be independent or correlated. Independent errors can often be characterized relatively easily while correlated measurement errors have shared and hierarchical components that complicate the description of their structure. For some important studies, Monte Carlo dosimetry systems that provide multiple realizations of exposure estimates have been used to represent such complex error structures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-term effects of in utero exposure to ionizing radiation remain poorly quantified in humans. In this study, the risk of hematologic malignancies was investigated in offspring of female workers of the Mayak Production Association, a large Russian nuclear facility. Excess relative risks (ERR) for exposure to gamma radiation and plutonium were estimated in a cohort of 8,466 offspring who were born between January 1, 1948 and December 31, 1988 and followed until 2009.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiat Prot Dosimetry
November 2017
The distribution of calculated internal doses has been determined for 8043 Mayak Production Associate (Mayak PA) workers. This is a subset of the entire cohort of 25 757 workers, for whom monitoring data are available. Statistical characteristics of point estimates of accumulated doses to 17 different tissues and organs and the uncertainty ranges were calculated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the Mayak Worker Dosimetry System (MWDS-2013), intakes of plutonium and organ doses are assessed on the basis of measurements made on the plutonium content of 56 400 urine samples. Altogether, there were urine bioassays for 7591 (29%) of the 25 757 cohort members who were employed any time at Mayak between 1948 and 1982. These measurements are subject to uncertainty due to many factors (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiat Prot Dosimetry
November 2017
Different dose estimates have been produced for the Mayak PA workforce over recent years (DOSES-2000, DOSES-2005, MWDS-2008). The dosimetry system MWDS-2013 described here differs from previous analyses, in that it deals directly with uncertainty in the assumed model parameters. This paper details the way in which uncertainty is dealt with within MWDS-2013 to produce the final output represented by a multiple hyper-realisation of organ doses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn order to estimate doses of workers exposed to plutonium, it is necessary to make assumptions about both the route and the time course of intake. The objective of this study was to determine a time course for the inhalation rate for plutonium (intake regime) useful for biokinetic modeling. Records from workplace air sampling, personnel biophysical examinations and autopsy data from former Mayak Production Association (MPA) workers were used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiat Prot Dosimetry
November 2017
The calculation of internal doses for the Mayak Worker Dosimetry System (MWDS-2013) involved extensive computational resources due to the complexity and sheer number of calculations required. The required output consisted of a set of 1000 hyper-realizations: each hyper-realization consists of a set (1 for each worker) of probability distributions of organ doses. This report describes the hardware components and computational approaches required to make the calculation tractable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe calculation of reliable and realistic doses for use in epidemiological studies for the quantification of risk from internal exposure to radioactive material is fundamental to the development of advice, guidance and regulations for the control and use of radioactive material. Thus, any programme of work carried out which requires the calculation of doses for use by epidemiologists ideally should contain a rigorous program of quality assurance (QA). This paper describes the initial QA (Phase I) implemented by Public Health England (PHE) and the Southern Urals Biophysics Institute (SUBI) as part of the work programme on internal dosimetry in the Joint Coordinating Committee for Radiation Effects Research Project 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies of cancer risk following in utero exposure to ionizing radiation are limited in number, particularly for adult-onset cancers, and the evidence is unclear. In the present study, the risk of solid cancer incidence following in utero radiation exposure is examined among 8466 offspring of female nuclear workers at one of the largest nuclear facilities (Mayak Production Association) in the Russian Federation. Poisson regression methods were used to estimate excess relative risks (ERRs) per Gray (Gy).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The estimation of plutonium fetal transfer and the calculation of individual in utero and postnatal doses for the Mayak Production Association (PA) offspring cohort.
Materials And Methods: The model developed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) for the transfer of plutonium to the fetus following maternal intakes before and during pregnancy has been adjusted for application to analysis of the fetal transfer of (239)Pu for Mayak workers. Improved estimates of fetal to maternal concentration ratios (CF:CM) have been obtained based on a correlation observed between adult offsprings' measured daily urine (239)Pu activity and estimates of their mothers' systemic activity at conception.
A new modification of the prior human lung compartment plutonium model, Doses-2005, has been described. The modified model was named "Mayak Worker Dosimetry System-2008" (MWDS-2008). In contrast to earlier models developed for workers at the Mayak Production Association (Mayak PA), the new model more correctly describes plutonium biokinetics and metabolism in pulmonary lymph nodes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStarting with the basic Poisson statistical model of a counting measurement process, 'extraPoisson' variance or 'overdispersion' are included by assuming that the Poisson parameter representing the mean number of counts itself comes from another distribution. The Poisson parameter is assumed to be given by the quantity of interest in the inference process multiplied by a lognormally distributed normalising coefficient plus an additional lognormal background that might be correlated with the normalising coefficient (shared uncertainty). The example of lognormal environmental background in uranium urine data is discussed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA method of parameterising the likelihood functions representing the uncertainty of Mayak plutonium urine bioassay measurements is described. The Poisson-lognormal model is assumed and data from 63 cases (1,087 urine measurements in all) are used to empirically determine the lognormal normalisation uncertainty, given the measurement uncertainties obtained from count quantities. An outlier-insensitive procedure is used to fit the cumulative probability distribution of scaled deviations in order to determine the normalisation uncertainty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral approaches are available for bioassay interpretation when assigning Pu doses to Mayak workers. First, a conventional approach is to apply ICRP models per se. An alternative method involves individualised fitting of bioassay data using Bayesian statistical methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Doses-2005 model is a combination of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) models modified using data from the Mayak Production Association cohort. Surrogate doses from inhaled plutonium can be assigned to approximately 29% of the Mayak workers using their urine bioassay measurements and other history records. The purpose of this study was to quantify and qualify the uncertainties in the estimates for radiation doses calculated with the Doses-2005 model by using Monte Carlo methods and perturbation theory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Mayak Production Association (MPA) was the first plutonium production plant in the former Soviet Union. Workers at the MPA were exposed to relatively large internal radiation intakes and external radiation exposures, particularly in the early years of plant operations. This paper describes the updated dosimetry database, "Doses-2005.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA method is presented to determine the uncertainties in the reported dose due to incorporated plutonium for the Mayak Worker Cohort. The methodology includes errors generated by both detection methods and modeling methods. To accomplish the task, the method includes classical statistics, Monte Carlo, perturbation, and reliability groupings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe biokinetics of inhaled plutonium were analyzed using compartment models representing their behavior within the respiratory tract, the gastrointestinal tract, and in systemic tissues. The processes of aerosol deposition, particle transport, absorption, and formation of a fixed deposit in the respiratory tract were formulated in the framework of the Human Respiratory Tract Model described in ICRP Publication 66. The values of parameters governing absorption and formation of the fixed deposit were established by fitting the model to the observations in 530 autopsy cases.
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