Answer to Question #424 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Q

Please suggest texts appropriate for students taking an introductory college-level course on environmental radiation who are nonscience majors. Thanks.

A

The most recent book of which I am aware is Environmental Radioactivity from Natural, Industrial, and Military Sources, Fourth Edition, by Merril Eisenbud and Thomas Gesell, 1997, Academic Press Inc., 525 B. Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, ISBN 0-12-235154-1. For a review of this book, see the review by Michael T. Ryan in Health Physics, Aug. 1997: 73(2):pg 403.

One of the coauthors, Professor Gesell, tells me that they use it as a senior/first year graduate text at Idaho State University. He indicates that parts of it would be fine as an introductory text but there is little of the basic material about nuclear physics and radiation in it.

Another similar textbook is Radioactivity in the Environment—Sources, Distribution and Surveillance by R.L. Kathren, 1984 Harwood Academic Publishers, New York, ISBN 3-7186-0603-2. However, I am not aware of a more recent edition of this book.

Both of the above textbooks are more oriented to scientific types than nonscience majors, but I think a serious nonscience major can follow either one. Nothing comes to mind as a textbook directed towards nonscience majors.

Various groups such as International Atomic Energy Agency, agencies, radiation protection organizations in various countries, professional societies, and industry have produced a number of pamphlets, training manuals, public information items, etc. oriented to the public; but you would have to do a lot of collecting and sorting to have a set of readings for an entire course.

Charles E. Roessler, CHP, PhD