Radionuclide uptake from soil to plants: Influence of soil classification

Abstract

The entry of trace contaminants, which are present in the terrestrial environment, into human food chains is controlled in the long term by their uptake by plant roots. The radionuclides released into the environment can give rise to human exposure by the transport through the atmosphere, through aquatic systems, or through soil subcompartments. Soil-to-plant factor is one of the important parameters to be used in transfer models for predicting the concentration of radionuclides in crops/plants and for estimating dose impacts to man. Existing databases are limited to experimental values in a restricted number of soil systems and are largely comprised of temperate environment data. In general, transfer factors show a large degree of variation dependent upon several factors such as soil type, species of plants, and other environmental conditions. Soil-to-plant transfers of the radionuclides varied considerably with the times of deposition also. In general, the variations with the deposition times were by a factor of up to 10. This chapter describes a review of published data on the transfer factor (TF) and classification of soils based on TFs.