Environment: From ENEA new tools to measure greenhouse gases and ionizing radiation

A consortium of 17 international partners of the European TraceRadon project, which includes ENEA with the National Institute of Metrology of Ionizing Radiations (INMRI), the Institute of Radioprotection and the Laboratory of Observations and Measurements for the Environment and Climate has developed new measurement tools for monitoring greenhouse gases and ionizing radiation.

These new measurements were calibrated on radon, a natural radioactive gas present in soils and rocks that accumulates in closed environments and is considered the main source of ionizing radiation.

The more accurate data obtained with these new methoda will be useful for atmospheric monitoring networks to calculate both CO2 and radiation protection levels.

 “Radon is a natural tracer for the study of atmospheric processes concerning air masses transport and concentrations of gaseous pollutants, which accumulate mainly in the part of the atmosphere closest to the earth's surface and directly affected by it”, explained Francesco Cardellini and Marco Capogni, researchers at INMRI-ENEA. “Variations in layers height (from a few tens of meters to a few kilometers) influence pollutants concentration, including radon. An accurate and reliable measurement of radon concentration and its flux from the ground is of considerable importance for atmospheric models which allow to estimate greenhouse gases like CO2", they said.

Among the main results achieved by the project, there is the development of new methods and procedures for calibrating instruments to measure outdoor radon concentrations (from a few units up to hundreds of becquerels per cubic meter), to be used in networks atmospheric monitoring and radiation protection. “In particular, ENEA has developed an accumulation chamber to measure the radon flow from soil, whose data, combined with physical analyses of soil and atmospheric parameters, have made it possible to validate various mathematical models of gas transport” , pointed out the two researchers.

Experts from all over Europe participated in one of the four measurement campaigns -held at the ENEA Casaccia Research Center- to develop procedures capable of detecting, in an increasingly reliable way, the flow of radon from the soil. “Improving these type of measures will help research on climate change and radiation protection, also to identify so-called priority areas at risk of radon, a colorless, odorless and tasteless gas which can pose a serious health risk: its radioactive decay generates unstable atoms, radionuclides, which once inhaled emit energy in the form of radiation in the respiratory system", explained Alessandro Rizzo at the Institute of Radioprotection.

Already today, in the European research infrastructure ICOS^[1], which includes the ENEA Observatory in Lampedusa, there are stations where radon in the atmosphere is constantly measured. “However, instruments and measurements of this gas still need to be improved, especially for low concentrations, to provide increasingly reliable data for the study of air pollution^[2] and for radiation monitoring to support national surveillance”, pointed out Damiano Sferlazzo and Francesco Monteleone at the ENEA Laboratory of Observations and Measurements for the Environment and Climate. “With this project we aim to transfer the new instruments to calibration laboratories for measurements in the field of ionizing radiation, to organizations developing standards (e.g. IEC, ISO) and to end users active in greenhouse gas monitoring and in radiation protection", concluded the researchers.