Page 30 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Oyedele

7. CONCLUSION

High background radiation areas could pose a threat to their inhabitants.
This threat could be increased by human activities. By measuring the activity
concentrations of radionuclides in the soil and calculating the
corresponding mean annual effective dose, one can make an assessment
of the background radiation in a city or town. In each of the cities and towns
studied in Namibia, the activity concentrations of the different radionuclides
(of interest) in the soil are not the same and, in general, the concentrations
of a given radionuclide vary from one location to another. The effective
dose rates determined for the cities and towns are not the same. While the
dose rates in some cities and towns are very low, those in some other towns
are relatively high and are more than double the others. However, all the
values obtained for the effective dose rates in the cities and towns are
much below the maximum permissible limit. These results indicate that the
cities and towns have normal background radiation so that radiation hazard
is negligible and there is no cause for alarm in these cities and towns.

As the country is interested in acquiring nuclear power reactors to meet its
increasing energy needs, the baseline data obtained in these studies will
serve as a reference for assessing the contribution of nuclear activities to
environmental radioactivity in future.