A tentative method to evaluate the building material contribution to indoor gamma dose rate

Publisher Summary Building materials are an important source of indoor gamma dose rate, particularly in multistory buildings. In many cases in that, it is difficult to enter the dwellings to measure the indoor gamma dose rate, such as for epidemiological studies and surveys, it is actually interesting to estimate the indoor gamma dose rate. In this chapter a new method to estimate the indoor gamma dose rate attributable to the building materials are presented in this chapter, based on the outdoor measurements performed close to an external wall of a dwelling and a room model elaboration. The method was compared using data collected within the framework of the Italian Epidemiological study SETIL on the aetiology of childhood leukaemia, lymphoma and neuroblastoma. In this chapter preliminary result of a new approach to estimate indoor gamma dose rate due to the building materials is reported. Both analyzed methods give good results on average, but, due to a very simple but more accurate analysis of the indoor situation, the combined method based on experimental data plus room model elaboration seems to describe the indoor gamma exposure much better than the simple outdoor measurement.