Environmental Earth Sciences

, Volume 71, Issue 3, pp 1319–1325 | Cite as

Measurements of indoor radon, thoron, and their progeny using twin cup dosimeters in rural areas of Northern India

Original Article
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Abstract

Radon, thoron, and their progeny are largest contributors to the radiation dose received by human beings present in the natural environment. The indoor radon depends upon many factors such as building materials, meteorology, ventilation, and occupant’s behavior. This paper presents the measurements of indoor radon, thoron, and their progeny in four villages in rural area of district Kanshiram Nagar (Kasganj) in the state of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. The concentration of indoor radon and thoron varies from 10.32 to 72.24 and 11.61 to 84.49 Bq m−3 with a geometric mean (GM) of 29.49 and 31.20 Bq m−3, respectively. The concentration of radon and thoron daughters was found to vary from 1.11 to 7.80 and 0.31 to 2.28 mWL, respectively. The annual exposure due to radon and thoron mainly vary from 0.05 to 0.30 WLM. The preliminary results (i.e., bare mode exposure of the LR-115 detectors fixed on cards) of this study have been separately published and compared this recent data with those results.

Keywords

Radon/thoron gas Twin cup dosimeters Annual exposure 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The Chairman, Department of Applied Physics, Z. H. College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India, is acknowledged for providing necessary research facilities. One of the author (Mr. M. Shakir Khan) is gratefully acknowledged the financial support by UGC [Ministry of Minority Affairs (MOMA) Scholar] in the form of Junior Research Fellow (JRF). I am highly thankful to my supervisor Dr. M. Mohisin Khan, Department of Applied Physics, AMU, Aligarh for his kind cooperation and help throughout the work carried out under his kind supervision. The authors are thankful to Dr. K. P. Eappen, former Scientist, Environmental Assessment Division, BARC, Mumbai, for his nice comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the residents, who permitted me to install the detectors in their dwellings. Finally, we thank three anonymous reviewers for their sensible advice, constructive criticism, detailed comments and suggestions, which helped us considerably to improve the quality of the manuscript.

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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Applied Physics, Z. H. College of Engineering and TechnologyAligarh Muslim UniversityAligarhIndia

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