Reference indicators enabling preliminary evaluations of the impact of radioactive releases on agricultural products

After the release of high levels of radioactivity into the environment, one of the main concern relates the contamination foodstuffs. In some exposure scenarios the transfer of radionuclides through the food chain to consumers represents a major contribution to human dose. Therefore an accurate estimation of radionuclide activity concentrations in agricultural products is crucial to evaluate the ingestion dose to the population consuming locally produced food. There are many mechanisms contributing to the radioacive contamination of agricultural products as interception, retention, absorption and translocation, due to mechanisms as deposition to the exposed plant surfaces, and/or root uptake. In the last decades several efforts have been spent in developing mathematical models to predict the potential transfers of radionuclides in plants and their concentration in the edible parts. Nevertheless the relative significance of each pathway depends on a large amount of variables and parameters that increase the complexity of the models, moreover the lack of expermental data, often limit the possibility to make any meaningful results. The main aspect that make difficult to predict the uptake of radionuclides by plants is the dynamic nature of the contamination scenarios due primarly to the the growing of plants. Nevertheless, there are some factors that can be considered as ‘static’ for each specific geographic area, and each specific radionuclide, as the soil characteristics, the type of crop, and the behavour of some radionuclides in the environment. In the framework of a preliminary safety assessment of a radioactive release scenario, these factors could be taken as reference indicators of the potential impact on the local human food chain radioactive contamination. In this work we focus on the analysis of the scientific literature pertaining to all experimntal studies in radionuclide plant uptake, from 2000 to 2020. The aims of this analysis is to collect set of some characteristics allowing to classify, in a macroscopic scale, specific reference indicators that most contribute to the radioactive contamination of agricultural products in different geographyc areas.