German Uranium Miners

This paper considers the radon problem in general and focuses on the radon-induced lung cancers in underground uranium miners. It was the noble prize winner of 1908, Ernest Rutherford who said: „We must bear in mind that all of us are continuously inhaling the radium and thorium emanations and ionized air-“. Radon, which derives from uranium (238U) was first detected by Friedrich Dorn in 1890. It represents a radioactive alpha-particles emitting element (number 222Rn) with a half-lifetime of 3.8 days, which further decays in a number of short living alpha-particle emitting elements having half-lifetimes in the range from 162 microseconds up to 27 minutes. Normally, when alpha-particles irradiate our bodies from outside there is no radiation danger or risk, because of the short range of the densely ionizing alpha-particles. The noble gas radon, however, and its different decay products become incorporated by inhalation together with aerosols and very fine distributed dusty particles. That is the reason, why it acts inside our bodies. It is the bronchial part of the lungs with their radiation-sensitive basal cells, where we have an inhomogeneous distribution of point-like microareas with very high local energy doses. This is the origin for the risk to get this very dangerous small cell lung cancer [7, 16].