Fate of Radiopharmaceuticals in the Environment

Markus R. Zehringer

A chapter in Sewage from IntechOpen

Abstract: After World War II, the use of artificially produced radionuclides in medicine began and led to great success in the fight against cancer and other diseases. However, the highly radioactive compounds had to be handled with great care to protect patients and hospital personnel from radiation. The survey of these radionuclides in the environment followed some years later. In Switzerland, double-tracked monitoring programs were started. On the emission side, hospitals and industries handling radiopharmaceuticals had to report their consummation of radionuclides yearly. A monitoring program of their waste waters and solid wastes was also started. On the immission side, the remaining radioactive wastes, which were released to the environment, had to be surveyed. Overall, only a few violations of the limits for radiopharmaceuticals were observed over the last 30 years in Switzerland. Nevertheless, the monitoring of radioactivity in the environment remains an important task as long as radionuclides are used in medicine.

Keywords: radiopharmaceuticals; y-90; Lu-177; I-131; sewage sludge; sewer sludge; suspended matter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/59595 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:133184

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.74665

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().