Operational Guidelines for Food Products Potentially Contaminated from a Radiological Dispersal Device Incident

M.A. Noska¹; W.C. Cunningham²; C. Yu³; J.-J. Cheng⁴; S. Kamboj³; S. Domotor⁴; and A. Wallo III⁴ (¹Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and Radiological Health; ²Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition; ³US Department of Energy; ⁴Argonne National Laboratory)

The Operational Guidelines Task Group (OGT) developed Operational Guidelines (Group G) for human consumption of crop and animal products for use by decision makers in preparation for an RDD incident. Guidelines are presented in a series of tables that list existing policy but also additional planning values (PVs) for radionuclides in foods. Rough estimates are also given for radionuclide levels in soil that may lead to these values. The soil values can aid the states and the agricultural community in decision making where time and resources would be committed to grow crops without knowing whether they will be marketable until after harvest. A software tool is also given for targeting specific ages, plant and soil types, dose coefficients, uptakes, etc. For food, the radionuclide values include Derived Intervention Levels (DILs), which are the benchmark values developed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are established policy. For other radionuclides, OGT developed PVs that can be used for pre- and post-event decision making until policy decisions are made. The derivations were based on the same guidance dose (5 mSv) and calculated using the same methodology used by FDA. Soil values are listed for land where plants are already growing and where crops have not yet been planted. Soil values are also listed where focused adult intake data are taken into account. For this work, OGT used the crop deposition model developed by the Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center, accounted for resuspended air concentrations, adjusted for weathering and radioactive decay, and applied the OGT RESRAD methodology for crop deposition and root uptake.

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