Radon priority areas definition, estimation and uncertainty

Abstract

Posing a substantial risk to human health, indoor radon has increasingly been subject to regulation. One key concept is the one of radon prone or priority areas, which are understood as regions where prevention, mitigation or remediation action should be taken with priority. Radon priority areas must be defined, and once defined, estimated from data. Radon priority area estimation or delineation amounts to a classification problem, as a domain (a country) has to be divided into mutually exclusive zones of different “priorityness”. Classifying areas into priority zones entails decisions about action to be implemented. Touching stakeholder interests, may prove economically and politically costly. Therefore, decisions should be justifi-able, which implies, among other, reliability of the radon priority area estimate, meaning statistically, controlling for estimation uncertainty. Some aspects of radon priority area definition, estimation, and uncertainty will be discussed in this paper.